Swot up in 2016: Four great finance books to read – from Bitcoin to the history of gold, how to spot a ponzi scheme and money making tips from motivational guru Tony Robbins
BITCOIN by Dominic Frisby
Bitcoin is king of the digital currencies and, for all its naysayers, it is not going away. 2015 was a year when both bitcoin and its underlying technology, the blockchain, inched further towards mainstream acceptance.
Frisby explains the modern history of currencies and why bitcoin’s anonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, was moved to create his own – while going to extreme lengths to keep his identity secret. For that matter, Frisby has a good idea who Nakamoto really is, and readers are privy to the (likely) truth. A brilliant read.
GOLD by Matthew Hart
Gold has bewitched and harassed humans for 6,000 years, and it’s not over yet. From a financial perspective, the price of physical gold is well below the record heights of $1,900 an ounce reached in the wake of the financial crisis. But gold bugs and bears remain on two sides of their loyal tribes.
Hart’s book takes the reader beyond the numbers, back to gold’s chequered history. He tells of South American civilisations, Mali deserts, places where people traded salt, slaves and gold. “Africa brims with gold. We emerged from Africa. Maybe the idea of gold came with us,” he says. Beautifully written.
MONEY: MASTER THE GAME by Tony Robbins
America’s premier motivational coach can also help you get started with investment and make your money work for you. This book is a tome, weighing in at over 600 pages, but its content is good.
It starts with a chapter explaining why money mastery is within your reach, however cash-strapped and flailing you feel. It’s Robbins’s empathy which makes this book; he knows you have no savings, he knows finance is confusing – he has been there himself. But it’s that assumption which makes his work accessible.
Robbins’s focus throughout is on revealing “wealth secrets” from interviews with professional investors looking after the assets of the ultra-wealthy. Big names include activist investor Carl Icahn and the chief executive of JP Morgan’s asset management division, Mary Callahan Erdoes. It’s worth noting this book is written for Americans – so a pension plan is a 401k, for example – and this also accounts for the saccharine tone.
HEROES & VILLAINS OF FINANCE by A Baldwin
Few industries are so alive with colourful characters as finance, since the pursuit of wealth has driven people to the very extremes of creativity and greed. This book profiles 50 of the greatest from year dot to the present day.
Where else would an Indian economist from the fourth century BC, Chanakya, be ranked alongside the Rothschild family and Ronald Reagan? Who knew that commodity derivatives began with Greek philosopher Thales of Miletus in 500 BC?
However heroic or villainous, no-one has more than two pages, large type, devoted to their story. And Baldwin makes no judgements, merely laying out the history and interesting anecdotes of figures as diverse as Chinese statesman Deng Xiaoping to head of the world’s largest ponzi scheme, Bernard Madoff. It’s fascinating to dip into.