The Citibank Guide to Building Personal Wealth : Essential Information for the Asia-Pacific Investor

Rating:
Summary: Good brief summary
Review: This book covers a wide range of investment vehicles available to asia-pacific investors, in a brief way. It benefits beginner investors the most to provide a broad overview of investment. With a basic mostly-accurate overview, beginner investor can look up specific topics from other books. However, don't spend too much time on this book if you couldn't understand certain topics as they are covered too briefly. For an example, the book just mentioned the inverse relationship between the interest rate change and change of the market value of bonds without giving any explanation. However can a average beginner, to whom this book is targeted, understand this?

This book is somewhat useful to intermediate investors to refresh their knowledages on various topics from various sources. It pieces them together. Nothing is covered in depth, whatever is covered is the most essential and mostly-accurate.

I'd like to give 4 stars until I read the last few chapters. Besides several obvious typos through out the book, there are two serious mistakes that I can't believe they could occur with a serious publisher like John Wiley, I have never encounter similar errors from any respectable publishers.

(1) In a chapter about insurance, the last paragraph on pg. 183 and first paragraph on the subsequent page are a direct cut-and-paste from pg. 138, which discusses efficient market theory. The paragraphs are total out of context.

(2) the only two formulas in this book is on pg. 214. both are formated in a very ugly way, the second is totally wrong, or it is too ugly for me the understand. The formulas are presented in a pure text format as in ".txt" file. You can imagine how horrible it is, and I can't imagine this could occurs to a publisher who is well-known for it scientific publications.