Rating: 5 out of 5
Generally, it’s not tough to find a book that’s interesting and enjoyable. I’ve got a while list of books I’ve yet to read, but frequently something in me makes me choose a new recommendation over an old one: this is especially true for some recommendations that touch on investing and finance. In this case, this was a recommendation from a financial writer who also summarised the work. Yet, for me, the brief intro into the topic made me want to jump deep into it which is why I picked this up.
All in all, this is a splendid book with many excellent parts. Covering a mining boom in Australia from the end of the 1960’s to its eventual downfall a few years later, there are helpful characteristics which the author brings it that any investor should know. However, Mr Sykes isn’t just a scaremonger with no basis: as a journalist through the boom, he had some interesting insights, including as to how his personal reporting affected the course some stocks would take in the markets.
And this is perhaps a characteristics of the most remarkable part of this book for me the author’s work into understanding what exactly happened and how it happened is second to none. There are digressions that cover one-off cases from the boom, investigations into the geological soundness of the companies, and background checks on company directors, their wives, their families, and friends. Insofar as this book needs to be categorised, it’s a splendid piece of investigative journalism, which—to be true—is frequently based on the official Senate hearings into the topic, but even so to have made the story so approachable and clear is a major success.
In the same line the author has added tens of descriptions to make the markets understandable: including descriptions of stocks, selling and buying them, floating them, etc. This makes the book approachable even to people unfamiliar with the world of investing. And as the lessons in here can be applicable to many, this is a book many would benefit and enjoy.
