The Long and the Short of It: A guide to finance and investment for normally intelligent people who aren't in the industry

The subtitle of the book says "a guide to finance and investment for normally intelligent people". Judging by this the author fails miserably. The book is verbose, overly theoretical, never really gets to the point, is frequently patronising like an out of touch university professor (the author is one) and is often dated. It shows that most of the book was written 15 years ago. The author seems to be obsessed with having to restate that the efficient market hypothesis or some other financial notion "is illuminating but not true" every fifth page. It's not even clear what he means by "not true". Then there are endless discourses about how the financial industry and economic science have somehow failed us but very, very little is said about how a specific household should invest. At one point, for no real reason, a bizarre and insulting claim about the citizens of East Germany is made. When Kay finally gets a little more specific toward the end of the book, he produces some bizarre mistakes. One is about dollar cost averaging and it's supposed benefit regarding return or risk. Dollar cost averaging is an arithmetic fallacy and has been refuted for the first time more than 40 years ago by a mathematician and many times over since then. Overall, if you seek practical, useful, correct investment advice you won't find it here.

John Kay is British so the wording and sentence construction is not what Americans are used to but he has a no nonsense way of making financial concepts interesting and easy to understand mixed with a little humor. One of my favorite financial authors.

John Kay has a way of writing about economics that eludes most authors who produce content for the subject. Some of his examples and explanations are a little dry, but that's just the nature of writing about something as abstract and money and finance. While I like to think of myself as moderately more well read that the average person on this subject, this book did explain some things that had eluded me... and that makes this book worth buying and reading, even if you think you know enough about money, investment and finance to be better informed than the average person (as Jim Jefferies says at the end of his comedy show, "I think we can all do a little better"; start here if you want to be better at money/investment).

This book was not an easy read for me. It is well written though, and very informative. It inspired me to look at the structure and combination of my investments. He does not promise to have a foolproof method of investing that makes me rich in a few years. Instead he gives some ideas how to cut costs of investments, how to ‘have realistic expectations, and how to look at risk and keep it to a reasonable level. It encouraged me to take responsibility of my money. I will continue to listen to the advice of experts and then use my own judgement, poor as it may be. It is good to keep on remembering that nobody has my own interest at heart like I do.It was also important to me to have pointed out that every upturn has a downturn and that I, a small investor, also called a retail investor it seems, always know less than the insiders. My advantage is that I do not have to satisfy a boss nor do I have to be better than other investors. All I need to achieve is to reach my realistic goal of retaining the value of my investment and have a small increase. I recommend the book.

Best book I've read recently on investing. Wish I had read it when I first started investing.