More Advanced

Now you are on your own. Here are some things you can do, books you can read, and ways to further advance your skills if you want.

Site

Look at parts of this site to which you may not have linked, particularly Commentaries, Who's Who, Choices

Books

Still on everyone's top ten and most people's top two of books on equity investment: "The Intelligent Investor" by Benjamin Graham. First published in 1949 based on ideas developed in the thirties.

For an insider's description of the role of the Institutions in the City it's hard to beat Tony Golding's "The City: Inside the Great Expectations Machine".

William Bernstein has been described in Investors Chronicle as "the quiet genius of modern investment advice". He is particularly strong on asset allocation (but with American assets). His book "The Four Pillars of Investing" is an excellent core text. Briefer, but more concentrated,  "The Intelligent Asset Allocator" brings clarity to what can be made to seem a forbidding subject.

Anyone except the complete numeri-phobe will obtain many pain-free insights about risk from "Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in the Markets and in Life" and "Black Swan" , by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

A very different sort of book, "How to Fund the Life you Want" (2022) by Robin Powell and Jonathan Hollow ranges widely over a whole range of both practical and conceptual issues for the UK investor. It benefits from a point-of-view that is uncorrupted by commercial interests.

Activities

Join an Investment Club, or collect some friends and form one.

Join United Kingdom Shareholders' Association. UKSA

Serious stuff

You may be sufficiently fascinated with the savings process to be prepared to spend serious time on stock selection. Read widely by all means, but you will find a disciplinary framework helpful. One that we like is the STAR system, developed over 30 years by economist John Mulligan.