The Physician Investor

Other Suggested Reading

The only way to be a successful investor is also the only way to be a successful physician, in fact, the only way to succeed at much of anything. Read, study, and work hard. Do not expect to generate an adequate return on your investments unless you are willing to spend significant time and effort. It is just not logical to work 55 or 60 or more hours a week and then lose all of the money generated from a years’ work because you will not spend one hour a week studying how to invest that money.

Seek as much counsel and advice as required, but in the end, you must make your own decisions. To do an adequate job with your investments, you must be as well informed as possible. You are your own best investment advisor.
Books

  1. The Millionaire Next Door: The Suprising Secrets of America’s Wealthy by Thomas J. Stanley and William D. Danko (Longstreet Press, 1996). This should be #1 on your reading list. It is not a book on investing, instead, it is the best book on thrift I have ever read. As the title suggests, your neighbor, who has a job that may pay much less than yours, who lives in a modest home and drives a modest car, through thrift (and compound interest), may well be “The Millionaire Next Door”.

  2. Unconventional Success: A Fundamental Approach to Personal Investment, by David F. Swensen (Free Press/Simon & Schuster, 2005). As head of the Yale Endowment since 1985, Swensen has generated an annual compound return of 16%. This is a scholarly work, yet was written for the lay investor. Swensen outlines the best methods for the average investor to maximize returns, while minimizing both risk and fees.

  3. The Road to Wealth: A Comprehensive Guide to Your Money by Suze Orman (Riverhead Books, 2008). I use this as my principal reference book to look up the details on just about anything that has to do with investing, retirement accounts, funding your children’s education, insurance needs, etc.

  4. The Coming Collapse of the Dollar and How to Profit From It by James Turk & John Rubino (Currency/Doubleday, 2004). This book details how gold has been the storehouse of wealth since the beginning of civilization and what they feel is the inevitable decline of the dollar, and all paper currencies.

  5. Irrational Exuberance and Irrational Exuberance Second Edition (Princeton U. Press, 2000 and 2005) by Robert Shiller.  Professor Shiller of Yale nailed the stock market bubble and the subsequent housing bubble and bust.

  6. Hot Commodities: How Anyone Can Invest Profitably in the World’s Best Markets by Jim Rogers (Random House, 2004). Rogers was co-founder of the Quantum Fund. This work was one of the first to recognize and detail the reasons for the current bull market in commodities. It provides an excellent historical perspective of how bull and bear markets in financial assets tend to correspond with bear and bull markets in real assets (commodities).

  7. Wealth, War & Wisdom by Barton Biggs (John Wiley & Sons, 2008).  Once or twice a century, unexpected catastrophic events occur.  Geographically and financially diversify your assets, and do it yesterday.

  8. Gold: The Once and Future Money by Nathan Lewis (John Wiley & Sons, 2007).  An interesting history of money and finance which makes a compelling argument for a return to the stability of gold as the preferred medium of exchange.

  9. Where are the Customers’ Yachts? or A Good Hard Look at Wall Street by Fred Schwed Jr. (Wiley and Sons, 1940, 2006). Schwed uses humor and even whimsy in what is really an insightful satire of Wall Street (sort of a twentieth century Gulliver’s Travels). His message: never forget that a broker’s primary mission is to make money for themselves and their employers. Example: At the end of the day, the brokers throw all of the money they received into the air. Whatever sticks to the ceiling is the clients, the rest is their’s.

Do not read anything that claims there is an easy way to get rich. You are wasting your time and money and receiving bogus, inevitably harmful advice.