There are a lot of books out there on how to become a millionaire, and quite a few on investing as well.  Mostly, they’re disappointing.  The millionaire books might be inspirational, the good ones anyway, and they may have some advice that’s useful, but in order to actually making them work, you would have to sign up for follow-up seminars and the special, proprietary coaching programs of the authors, all of them expensive.

And about those books on investments – they tend to be disappointing for a different reason:  Either they’re too basic and conservative, in the vein of promising you that you too can become a millionaire if you invest 10% of your salary for the next 40 years.

Or they are, once again, too vague.  They might provide introductions into some of the basics of certain aspects of stock trading, but if you’d try to actually follow their advice, you’d soon find yourself in hot water.

Not so with Adam Khoo and Conrad Lim’s book, Secrets of Millionaire Investors.  Just from looking at the title, I would have probably expected more of the same.  But Adam and Conrad actually provide the blueprints – and the details – on how to make investing work.

The book starts with a bang – taking us right into the world of trading stocks, and the challenges Adam faced during his first attempts at making it work.  Let’s just say it wasn’t a pretty sight.  For two years, he played it safe after that.

But the failures were just stepping stones, prompting Adam to seek out mentors and models from whom he could learn, something he discusses in much detail in some of his other books, for example in Master Your Mind and in Secrets of Self-Made Millionaires.

His key role model:  Warren Buffett, arguably the world’s most successful investor.  He studied what Buffett had done and quickly saw where he himself had gone wrong.  His other investing books were of the sort I mentioned above – providing good but incomplete information, and Adam learned the hard way that a little knowledge, even if it’s good, can be very dangerous.

So he set out to learn everything he needed to know to become a successful investor, and started to apply what he learned.  First he focused on Singapore, but he quickly moved on to the U.S. stock market, a much more dynamic marketplace.

But even skilled investing in the stock market only gets you so far.  He soon noticed that some of his friends doubled their money in weeks…  by buying options.

So he attended seminars and quickly expanded his expertise to options as well.

Next, Adam’s co-author, Conrad Lim, shares his own rags-to-riches story.  He decided to learn about the stock market after going through several business failures and a bankruptcy.  I actually find that inspiring.  It means that even after thorough failure, you have a chance to better yourself, and become wealthy.

On his quest to learn about the stock market, Conrad too suffered the failures caused by good but incomplete information.  He quickly learned from his mistakes, though, and slowly, he was making gains.  After about a year, he was consistently earning a nice full-time income just from trading stocks, and things went uphill from there. He went from failure to becoming someone people sought out for advice.

Next, the book goes into the meat of investing, starting by dispelling the myths perpetrated by most of the other books, especially the one about the correlation between low risk and low return on one side, and high risk and high return on the other.

Comments are closed.