Learn to Earn : A Beginner's Guide to the Basics of Investing and Business

Rating:
Summary: Great for beginners, indeed
Review: As a beginner in personal finance and investing, I found this book very insightful. From the book, I got to know what capitalism is about, the history of some well-known American companies, as well as the differences among ways of investments. I think this book really does a good job preparing a beginner to head for more advanced investment techniques.

Rating:
Summary: Promotes Dangerous and Inappropriate Activity
Review: Contrary to what the subtitle of this book says, it does not provide an introduction to investing or business. The book is in fact a blasphemous exhortation to 'dabble'- essentially to speculate, in the stock market.

The book, which was written in 1995, right around the middle of the greatest speculative bubble in United States history to date, fed into a common and pernicious malady among small investors- everyone it seems was making 'easy money' in stocks, and naturally many wondered how they too could get some of this 'easy money'. Lynch sought to answer that question within the confines of this misguided, thoroughly misleading book.

Well, of course you know the most recent ancient history. By the end of the 1990s and sometime around 2001, heaps of folks were lucky to have kept about half of what they put into the market, and many never even recovered (nor can they ever hope to recover) their losses to this day. More than a few readers of this book were led astray by the reckless stock cheerleading found throughout this book.

Learn to Earn... was a bad book because it gives the uninformed reader and financial novice just enough information (and an abundance of encouragement) to get himself or herself into a whole lot of trouble in the stock market. It lays out all the benefits of investing, defends with vigor the New Improved American Capitalism, and highlights all the fun and wonderful things that can happen when one one buys stocks and becomes an owner of a Great American Enterprise, without devoting any significant space to the pitfalls, costs and dangers of stock operations. Yet, I sensed in reading this book that the text was written two minds. While Mr. Lynch prattled incessantly about the wonderful world of stocks, with paragraph after paragraph of ebullient optimism, every so often Mr. Rothchild slips in a bit of sobering realism with a sentence or two here and there. In particular, really good morsels of information such as: starting a dedicated savings program before embarking on investing, managing and even better, avoiding, credit debt for investment success, and in any bull market, in the end the little guy gets killed and the Big Boys get bailed out by their rich and politically powerful cronies (as we saw in the last pass of the bull), could only have come from the level-headed and jaded mind of Mr. Rothchild (who by the way authored the cleverly titled gem, A Fool and His Money).

As can be expected with any investment book penned by Mr. Lynch, a number of statements are either half-truths or are just plain wrong. First, Mr. Lynch adheres to his flawed definition of an investor (which he uses in every book)- anyone that buys stocks and only stocks. From this flows his conviction, boldly stated on page 122, "If you are long-term investor, ignore all the bond funds and hybrid funds (those that invest in a mixture of stocks and bonds) and go for the pure stock funds." Throughout the book, he takes a similar stance on individual stock versus bond purchases.

Now, if you had not followed Mr. Lynch's brilliant and worldly wise 'investment counsel', you would have made pretty decent money in both high quality corporate bonds and US Treasuries (or even US Savings Bonds) over the last eight years, especially when compared against your peers who fully invested in stocks. Also, inflation, which Mr. Lynch (and many other scurrilous financial 'experts') uses to scare readers into buying stocks, was moderate during the eight year period, and we even had a spell of deflation at one point, thereby actually boosting bond returns. When all was said and done, it turned out that holding a combination of high quality bonds and high quality stocks out-performed total stock positions over the last few years.

Yet another of Mr. Lynch's erroneous convictions is that investors (buyers of stock) are the vanguards of capitalism. This is a half-truth. In fact, speculators are the vanguard of capitalism, as they provide venture capital and implicitly assume risk. Investors on the other hand, that is, those enterprising souls looking for income with (reasonable) security of capital, only come in after the enterprise has proven itself in the marketplace.

Thus, in essence, readers of this book receive good tutelage on how they too can become speculators, much like the 'stock operators' of the Roaring 1920s. Finally, the fact that the target audienc efor this book is young adults truly shocks me, as quite frankly, Mr. Lynch and others in the financial community are knowingly and purposefully engendering a nation of mindless, stock-buying drones hell-bent on gambling away their hard-won earnings, and their personal financial futures to boot.

Rating:
Summary: Step One
Review: Good beginning book if you have never taken a business class in school or are brand new to investing
Mr Lynch's advice:
Start now
Have a plan
Do your homework
Hang in there for the long term (a 20 year timeline)
I suppose you could apply it to almost anything in life. Losing weight, studying a foreign language, or starting a business etc.
This advice seems a little vanilla to me, however if you are just starting out this may be all you need.
Buy this book if you are in stage one of your investment path.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent reference
Review: Great investment book for beginners and also great reference book!

Rating:
Summary: simplistic
Review: I really enjoyed the historical review and even the partial diatribes on the importance of our business leaders and their importance to society. I read this book in one sitting and would buy it again but "Learn to Earn" seems misleading.

I found little useful information for investing. I consider myself a novice at investing but this book offered nothing to really make me a better invester that I did not already know. One reviewer said that the useful investing information could be summed up in 3 or 4 pages. I agree if you want to reduce this book to a text book of investing but don't discard the other information presented. I found it very interesting at the least but more likely useful historical perspective that can affect the way I invest.

If you want a more pure book on investing there are books like The Warren Buffet Way and even more text-book-like ones out there. This is a good soft core book of investing that is an enjoyable read. I recommend it.

Rating:
Summary: For every beginners at any age
Review: I think this is a great book because it gives you the economic history of this country like no any other book! Perhaps I would like to see that this book devotes two third of its content to stock picking, in stead of half. Every beginners at any age should read this book before any other books. I am oftern surprised to learn that many so called "small investors" , who have large amount of retirement money in the wall street, have no ideas about the stork market! No wonder why so many casualties are along the way. I wish I was 13 when I read this book. I would be much richer for sure.

Rating:
Summary: Learn to Earn
Review: I thought the book was excellent. I appreciated the historical perspective on the financial history of our country. Additionally, my brother who has gotten me interested in investing, and who is also a new investor, is making a lot of the mistakes mentioned in the book. I have tried to convince him to read this book but alas, he won't listen.

My approach to any new venture is to get as much information as I can. I think this book is an excellent starting point.

Rating:
Summary: The Complete Idiot's Guide to Investing for Dummies 101
Review: O.k., o.k. so maybe it's not all that simple but I actually meant that in a good way -- I'm the type of guy that would rather understand and retain 100% of a simple book than only 10-50% of a more byzantine treatise. And that's what this book allowed me to do. I am a smart guy who reads and knows a lot about entrepreneurship, building companies, and real estate investing, but I never bothered to learn about the basics of the stock market... it always seemed so... foreign to me. This book got me over that hump... Peter Lynch did a phenomenal job of starting from the basics of yesteryear and building up to the stock market of today -- or sort of today... I think the book was written in the pre-intenet era so some of the info is a bit out-dated.

Excellent book for a beginner who wants to build a strong foundation of understanding of the stock market. It would make a great gift for a child, teenager, or young person who's intelligent and curious but for whatever reason uninformed about how the stock market works and how they can benefit from its existence.

Rating:
Summary: Good for beginners like me
Review: This book is apparently written for students, but the only way you feel that is the author's occasional attempt to be hip to what brand names his younger readers would recognize.

It is a solid introduction to how companies and the stock market works, with lots of interesting tidbits from history.

I wish he had written more about Index Funds, because further studies have shown me that many experts regard these as the closest thing to a safe bet you can make in stocks. But of course a book consisting of the one sentence "buy index funds" might not sell well. :)

Rating:
Summary: Good book for begineers
Review: This book is great for the beginning investor especially if they are students. In fact I believe that this book or something similar should be required reading in grade or high school.

This book is very basic and covers these interesting topics:

Companies around us (describes what companies are and what they do for us)
Short history of capitalism (this is a great historical introduction to this wonderful economic method)
Investing basics (why invest, what to invest in, etc..)
The lives of a company (describes how a small company can grow into a large well known giant)

Among other topics. This book is a great read, and should be read by every high schooler before they venture out on there own.

Reed Floren