The Best Investment Advice I Ever Received: Priceless Wisdom from Warren Buffett, Jim Cramer, Suze Orman, Steve Forbes, and Dozens of Other Top Financial Experts [Hardcover]

This is a wonderful book with a collection of investment advice from business superstars and investment gurus. For what they are worth, they serve as good stories and great food for thought as we are always interested in hearing what the Fortune 500 CEOs, personal finance and investment heavyweights have to say about accumulating great wealth and their individual investment strategies and experiences. Having said that, I don't think it is a useful book to pick up to learn about investment (maybe that is not the author's intentions anyways), particularly for beginners.

First of all, we are reading about personal investment strategies and experiences from different people which may not be applicable to you. I would have to say some of the people interviewed for investment advices have their own agendas. For instance, I noticed various instances where a CEO of a mutual fund company will highly recommend investing in mutual funds as the way to go, or a CEO saying investing a whole lot into his own company's shares and never sold a single share as the reason for his great wealth. Well, I am not here to judge whether their investment advices are sound or not, but just to warn readers not to simply follow their investment advices just because they are CEOs, chairman, founders of billion dollar investment companies. There is a piece of advice offered by a CEO not to invest in individual stock since you will never know enough about that particular stock to comfortably invest in it. He recommends buying baskets of stocks (mutual fund) and as you guess it, he is the founder of a big mutual fund company. So, please take every piece of advice as investment stories not investment advices that you have to follow.

However, there is a common useful theme revolving each of their individual investment strategies and experiences which I will summarized as below:

1) Invest in management. Management is the most important factor to whether you should invest in a company (or bail out). A great management can turnaround a dying company whereas a thriving promising company in the best sector could easily be killed by lousy management decisions

2) Always diversify your investments. Never put all eggs in one basket, meaning, never just put all your investment money in a single stock, single mutual fund, single ETF, single sector, single industry or single anything! Always diversify and spread the risks.

3) Think about the worse possible downside risks to your potential investment (and see if you can handle the loss) before imagining about its potential upside rewards. If you have done so, I am pretty sure you will heed the advice of #2 above. I have heard countless stories and hot stock tips of how things are different now, it is a sure thing to invest with unlimited upside potential, well, they all seem very attractive til you considered their possible downside risks.

4) Be a contrarian. Bet against mass phychology. More often than you would think, you will come out as a winner. When everyone is rushing madly into a single sector, a single industry, a single stock, flashing daily news and continuous media coverage about certain something, dash the opposite direction please! Unloved, forgotten, boring sectors are where you could find hidden gems

Dow Jones are at its all-time high, with mad money investing in U.S. equities painting a rosy image that economy is healthy and growing where dollars are in fact crumbling and losing gains against major currencies and gold prices making a very strong comeback. As a contrarian thinker, have you thought of investing in foreign currency, precious commodities like gold/silver as a hedge against U.S. economy and potential profits? With everyone rushing to buy oil/natural gas stocks, may be we could invest in alternative energy sources like uranium to build nuclear power plants that are much cleaner, cheaper and more efficient to generate electricity than coal/natural gas. Just some food for thought...

Best of luck to your investment future!

This is a compilation of thoughts from various business and finance gurus, each ranging from a few lines to a few pages in length. Some of them are inciteful and well worth heeding. Others were so shallow that I wonder why they chose to include them at all. You are better off reading Jim Cramer's several books or the classics by Bogle, Lynch, and Graham, if you want to improve your investment skills. If you are looking for basic household money management help, look at Dave Ramsey's publications.

These days, it seems financial "tips" are a dime a dozen. From neighbors to in-laws, everyone has advice to offer. Yet what we all really want to know is what advice would be given by those who have actually achieved incredible financial success.

Liz Claman, anchor for CNBC, has daily opportunities to interact with these financial giants. After years of on-and-off camera exchanges, Claman decided to help make the real insider advice available to everyone. She asked more than sixty of the smartest, most successful business people in the world to relate the best investment advice they've ever received. The result is a stunning compilation of tried-and-true investment strategy. From Buffett to Forbes to

Trump, the reader will be amazed by how many of the greatest investors have contributed essays to this collection.

Pick up this book, and you will be amazed at the practical advice that its pages contain. If you're a novice in the investment world, you will surely appreciate the common themes that emerge from the various essays. These experts give concrete advice about how to get involved in the game even if you have little energy or time to devote to investing. If you have more time and want to be actively involved, you will receive straightforward guidelines that can be applied to choosing stocks wisely.

Even seasoned investors will be drawn to this book because of the intriguing correlations between these financial giants and the advice that they give. It's fascinating to see the connections between an investor's particular strategy and his or her unique success.

If you want to know how the experts make sense of the overwhelming investment field, I highly recommend that you pick up this book. If you were just to read one book on investment, this might be a good one because of how the common themes for financial success are hammered home. After finishing the essays, you will be well-equipped to move from paralyzed confusion to actual decision making.

Armchair Interviews says: Advice of the experts available to the average, low-profile investor!