“100 secret strategies for investing”
This is a kind of “Being Richard Farley for Dummies” book, it describes who he is and how he does the things he does. But for all that its actually quite an interesting read. He has split his thoughts up into 10 sets of 10 ‘secrets’, some of which are more common sense than others, but they all hang together to make a coherent whole.
I must confess that I wasn’t expecting much from this book, he comes over as a bit of a playboy millionaire from his website (but I think its been redone since I first saw it). There is a lot of good information in the book about an investment strategy, and some background on his thought processes in formulating it.
There is some personal interest, he was one of the people who funded Mathengine, the company I worked for in Oxford, here is what he says about that:
“3.1 Good ideas can lose money
…
In the late 1990s I invested in two companies which I thought had a great future: Addavita and MathEngine
Addavita – algae production
…
MathEngine – computer graphics
MathEngines idea was to help produce realistic graphics for the computer games industry. In the mid 90s games were not very lifelike. One problem was that moving objects did not always follow real physics – the equations involved were often too complicated for games programmers. So MathEngine hired university graduates in physics and mathematics who created tool kits for programmers to use. With the use of the tools, phenomena such as bouncing balls, rippling water or shattering glass could be made more realistic.
With both of these investments, however, I lost my entire stake when the companies went broke!”
So, two years of my life reduced to a warning and placed next to an algae farm. Thanks Richard, I hope we can do it again sometime.
But he has his fingers in a number of pies, including Amino Communications (STBs), Ant (the browser people) and IP2IPO (now IP Group, I believe).
He clearly has more to him than being a rich kid, he is self-made, having been adopted as a child, so some of his investments must make up for the Mathengines he’s been burnt by.
All in all, a fairly light read, but with some great information about investment. I don’t agree with a lot of it, but hes the millionaire and I’m not so who are you going to trust for your investment advice?
Who should read this book? Most of you, especially if you think investing is some kind of black art.
