Christmas is coming - What books can you recommend?

pensionpawn

Received The Man Who Solved the Market last Christmas and found it a very enjoyable read, especially if you like a little maths and computation (Quant analysis) mixed in with your finance. It's not going to show you how to maximise the growth of your portfolio, although it may give you food for thought!

Thrugelmir

pensionpawn said:

 although it may give you food for thought!

That's the key to reading a broad range of books on the topic. No one has the perfect answer. 

gm0

McClung - Living off Your Money. 

Mix of the academic, backtesting and the practical.  Gets most of the way to a practical guide to implementation planning for drawdown (and does a load of comparative backtesting and stress testing of alternative methods for various aspects from the literature.  So very good for building confidence in a DIY plan and its mechanics.

Should probably not be your very first reading on "what is drawdown" as it will be offputting until you have the rough shape of what is going on sorted out.

Blackavar

Mistermeaner said:

Genuine question - is there a benefit in reading all this stuff over and above living prudently , monthly investing into a low cost global tracker and having a simple yet decent spreadsheet with some reasonable growth and withdrawal assumptions ?

Since retiring a few years ago I've found a great new interest in investing (I really wish I'd done this many years ago) and I'm very keen to learn more. I've experienced the ups and downs, made mistakes, learned from them  and keen to learn more. 

Sailtheworld

Investing Demystified by Lars Kroijer - as someone else mentioned he has a video series that complements the book. Still a good read.

Sailtheworld

Mistermeaner said:

Genuine question - is there a benefit in reading all this stuff over and above living prudently , monthly investing into a low cost global tracker and having a simple yet decent spreadsheet with some reasonable growth and withdrawal assumptions ?

If you're on top of all the things you can control then it might be a case of diminishing returns. However, if you stop looking for ways to improve your finances you won't find them.

I recently found a mistake in my spreadsheet. A snippet on here alerted me to it. If I wasn't looking it would still be there.

Prism

gm0 said:

McClung - Living off Your Money. 

Mix of the academic, backtesting and the practical.  Gets most of the way to a practical guide to implementation planning for drawdown (and does a load of comparative backtesting and stress testing of alternative methods for various aspects from the literature.  So very good for building confidence in a DIY plan and its mechanics.

Should probably not be your very first reading on "what is drawdown" as it will be offputting until you have the rough shape of what is going on sorted out.

Agreed. This book taught me that the drawdown strategy during retirement, which you can control, is more important than your returns, which you can only partially control. It is possible to construct a plan than can cope with almost anything you throw at it. Active funds or passive funds, high or low inflation, great returns or poor returns - all of that becomes background.