A10, Stock Trader Dude

Not a great book, but it can be summed up as follows:1.    Start a business (the richest road!).
2.    Become CEO of a company.
3.    Work with/become a sidekick to a successful visionary and ride along.
4.    Turn celebrity status into wealth, or wealth into celebrity status and then more wealth.
5.    Marry someone very rich.
6.    Steal – legal theft, not by force.
7.    Use other people’s money (OPM) – knowing very wealthy people opens up possibilities.
8.    Invent a revenue stream (not about being an inventor but linking/grabbing on to an idea and executing it to bring cash-flow).
9.    Make use of unrealized real estate wealth.
10.  Save money, and somehow invest it well over and over.Nothing really new to speak of and there are more established books about wealth (for example see How to be rich on this website) and about how billionaires went along the path toward wealth creation. The Ten Roads book is comprised of stories about rich people, and it could be interesting if you enjoy history, but reading stories about rich people doesn’t make the reader rich. What the book misses, the point almost all these kinds of books miss is that wealth is created from elements that we don’t understand yet, and that imbalance helps create wealth, so looking backward for ideas doesn’t help you become the next Google (an immensely profitable business model platform that didn’t even exist ten years before the founders started). Online social networking is a great business, but nobody knew it was going to be a mega-business until the market responded.****Update**** 3/3/09
Here’s an example of what I mean. This article from Forbes discusses teenagers that somehow began businesses that made them wealthy at a young age. Here is another Forbes article. When it comes to making money, it sometimes pays the most money by ignoring business and marketing guru books. Fail enough on your own until the market responds. Books are about ideas; wealth is determined by market response.

The people who buy books like this miss the point. Bear market greatness means making money by selling stocks, and although you can buy cheap stocks, that is not the point, the point is to be able to turn them over for a profit before the next drop. The 2008 version of this book failed in a practical sense because it never considered that shorting stocks would have been the best approach to protecting stock assets and generating a return. Any investment can become overvalued, that is the essential component of benefiting from your holdings – holding on for the long-term doesn’t work as well as disposing of assets as they become significantly overvalued.

The education of Tom Perkins was an easy book to get into and I finished it in a few days. I’ve always wondered about the venture capital side of the business, and although it is not a book about venture capital, it does blend together a number of interesting business and personal events. In the book the author has an experience of dumping his collection of rare cars before the market turns down. He sensed the market value wouldn’t hold, decided to auction his cars, and within a year the market for those cars significantly dropped. For guys like Mr. Perkins, it’s not the money that the reader will necessarily want since the author does not directly discuss wealth, it’s the approach to life the guy has, and consequently, an interesting life from a guy that worked on something worthwhile according to his blissful interests.