One Hour Investor Book Review – Learn investing in one hour
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I just finished reading One Hour Investor, a book by Vishal Reddy. This book is an investing guide for beginners. The idea is that you can learn all the basics of investing in about one hour through the book.
One Hour Investor is fast to read and keep its promise of one hour guide, at least if you are a quick reader.
The book contains a lot of useful information about the basics of investing. Stocks and bonds are covered in detail. The book even goes over the various strategies used for picking stocks.
Then, the book goes more into mutual funds and ETFs. It explains why most people should favor them instead of picking individual stocks. Various investing strategies are also covered. And finally, it goes on into how to optimize investment taxes.
Stay tuned if you want to know if you can learn to invest in about one hour.
One Hour Investor
The idea of One Hour Investor is fairly simple: it wants to teach you about all the basics of investing in about an hour. It is made for beginners of the market. But it also contains some more advanced notions that could be helpful to more people.
One Hour Investor starts with the value of money and time and their relation. It shows the great effect of compounding over time. And it shows well the power of investing early. Indeed, compounding is getting better and better the more years you keep your money invested!
The book then goes on to cover the assets you can use to get returns from your money. They start with covering savings account and certificate of deposits. Then, the author covers stocks and bonds in great detail.
Stocks
The book describes quite well how stocks are working. What is interesting is that the author spends time explaining the essential information about stocks:
- Price
- Volume
- Market Capitalization
- Beta: There is a really good explanation for something that not many people know.
- Earnings Per Share (EPS)
- Price per Earnings (PE)
The book also goes into detail as to how dividends are working. I found it well explained.
After having explained all the details about stocks, the author goes into detail as to how to analyze a specific stock. There are two main ways of doing that:
- Fundamental Analysis: Analyze a company and details and try to predict how it will do in the future.
- Technical Analysis: Analyze a stock price in detail to try to predict where it will go in the future.
These two analyses are covered in detail in the book.
Bonds
Bonds are seemingly straightforward to understand. However, they are more complicated than it seems because they are also correlated to the interest rate. And this is something that a lot of people do not understand correctly.
The book has an entire chapter about bonds. It explains thoroughly what a coupon is and how to compute the yield of a bond. And it also illustrates well the correlation between the interest rate and bond prices.
Finally, several kinds of bonds are also explained. The different types of bonds issued by the U.S. government are covered in detail. And Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities (TIPS) are also detailed. TIPS are important to understand because many people chose to invest in them. Finally, international bonds, municipal bonds, and corporate are also explained.
Mutual Funds
Of course, an investing book needs to cover mutual funds these days.
The book does a good job of explaining how mutual funds are working. It also covers passive mutual funds versus active mutual funds. Even though an active fund tries to beat the market (hint: it does not!), they charge more. Therefore, they are not worth it. You should prefer passive index funds.
One thing that I do not agree with the author is that he mentions passive index funds as having about 0.5% fees. I think this is bad to present it like this because you can find funds with much cheaper Total Expense Ration (TER)! These days, I consider that a fund with more than 0.25% fees is too expensive!
Exchange-Traded Funds (ETFs)
And of course, the book also has to cover Exchange-Traded Funds (ETFs). I just think that the book could have gone in more detail on this subject.
And there is another thing I did not like here: the author states that ETFs are for short-term investing while mutual funds are for the long-term. But there is absolutely nothing wrong with holding ETFs for the long-term. In some cases, it is even better since many ETFs have lower fees than their equivalent mutual funds.
Retirement
The author also describes the standard American retirement accounts. The book covers the 401(K), the Roth 401(K), the IRA, and Roth IRA. These are the most used retirement accounts in the U.S.
This is very standard information about these retirement accounts. It shows that you should use them. But I feel this is lacking a bit of substance honestly.
Investing Strategies
Finally, the book is covering a few investing strategies. It covers how much bonds and international allocation you need for each strategy. The author talks about the following investing strategies:
- Conservative: Mainly bonds, some stocks, some money-market, and little international exposure and some cash.
- Moderate: Some bonds (corporate and treasury), more stocks (split between value and growth), and medium international exposure and some cash.
- Aggressive: little bonds, most stocks with large emerging markets position, and still some cash.
These are interesting configurations. But I honestly think that they are too conservative. An aggressive investor is unlikely to need bonds. And an aggressive investor should probably not hold 10% of cash unless it is for an opportunity fund.
And even the conservative strategy is a bit weird for me. I do not think 5% of international exposure will make any difference. A conservative investor should probably forego international allocation if living in a country such as the United States.
This chapter would have been much better with at least one example portfolio for each investing strategy.
What I liked
One Hour Investor did a good job covering the basics of stocks, bonds, and mutual funds. It gets into details, but not so much that it becomes long and complicated. I think the author did an excellent job of keeping it in focus.
It is good that the author explained many terms about stocks. For instance, not many books cover the Beta of a stock. It is something you see in many places. But it is very rarely explained.
Also, I liked the explanation about bonds. It is something that a lot of books are not good at. A lot of people think that bonds are very simple. But bonds are not as simple as people think they are!
What I did not like
Although One Hour Investor is a good book, there are a few big things I did not like about it.
The first big thing I did not like is that it completely ignores inflation. It only shows the power of compounding interest in investing but does not take into account inflation. Inflation also compounds. Inflation is why we need more than a few percent returns year after year to beat inflation. And this is often the main reason we should invest.
The lack of inflation also means that the author recommends savings accounts as a good way to invest. They are definitely not!
Then, I also did not like the chapter on ETF. It does not go into enough detail. And I do not agree with its conclusion that ETFs are for the short-term. I would also not have mentioned 0.5% fees for passive investing. A 0.5% fee is already too much and will make people think 0.5% is okay while it is not!
The book starts with a few formulas on how to compute some basics interest. But then, it completely goes away and only depends on calculators. It would not have taken a lot to provide the formulas into the book.
I think it is quite poor practice to make the reader rely on an external calculator to make the same things as the book. We are not even talking about complicated formulas. All these formulas are relatively simple and should be present in the book.
Finally, I think the author should insist more on the dangers of stock picking. Most of the chapters are about investing in single stocks. The author covers some of the advantages of mutual funds and ETFs. But I should say he should have put more emphasis on the risks of stock picking.
Conclusion
Overall, One Hour Investor is a good book. It will not make you a genius at investing. But it will teach you most of the basics you need to know if you want to start investing in the stock market.
If you do not have much time to go through a very large book, you may want to read One Hour Investor. You should be able to read this book in about an hour. And it contains most of the information you will need to get started.
But there are some things in One Hour Investor about which I do not agree. The investing strategies proposed in the book seem a bit random and too conservative for most people. And they lack real examples.
Moreover, the retirement chapter is lacking some substance, as are some of the other discussions. I feel like some things should have been removed while others were discussed more if the author wanted to keep the book short.
Thanks a lot to TCK Publishing that gave me a copy of this book for review. It was a nice book to read. If you are interested, you can also find its author, Vishal Reddy, on Twitter @Kevinhorsley.
To discover more great books, read about the best personal finance books.
Did you ever read One Hour Investor? What did you think? Do you have another book to recommend?
I just finished reading One Hour Investor, a book by Vishal Reddy. This book is an investing guide for beginners. The idea is that you can learn all the basics of investing in about one hour through the book.
URL: https://thepoorswiss.com/one-hour-investor-book-review/
Name: One Hour Investor
Author: Array
ISBN: 1631610686
Date Published: 09/05/2019
Format: https://schema.org/Hardcover
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Hi Baptiste,
First of all, your blog is great! You are capable of explaining complex concepts in a very simple way. I just started to get into these topics and your blog is helping me a lot.
I have one question. Which books would you suggest for a beginner like me in finance? I am a Data Scientist, with a good understending of maths and statistics but I have a very poor knowledge of finance. I will start with “Learn investing in an hour”, what would you seggest next? Do you reccomend any online course as well? Perhaps do you have one? :)
Thank you very much,
Riccardo
Hi Riccardo,
I would recommend either the Simple Path to Wealth or (and?) Just Keep Buying.
If you have not bought “One hour investing book”, I would recommend you buy the other two. Instead, they are significantly better.
Online courses are not necessary. They are just a way for creators to make a ton of money without profiting the people taking the course. 99% of them aren’t worth the price.
If you find some ebooks, that could be interesting, but I don’t know great ebooks on the subject. Maybe I should do one? :P
Sounds good.
One more question, if you don’t mind:
Is a rebalancing (which VZ does automatically) of your portfolio a good idea?
My gf is American living in Switzerland and can’t open an account with VZ (I can though) but she would like to invest in ETFs – you mentioned IB for example – do you recommend rebalancing there and also get some bonds etc.?
Thanks a lot
Hi Peter,
It’s difficult to say honestly. If you rebalance, this means you will sell high performing things to invest more in low performing things. This will allow you to sell high and buy low. However, if the low-performing things are always going down, you will not make yourself a favor.
For the long-term, it’s a good thing. For the short-term, not so much. So it will depend on your investment horizon.
For IB, it’s the same thing, you can do it if you want. Now, if you are investing every month, you can simply use this to have balanced investments. I always invest in the asset that is the most off balance.
As for bonds, currently, in Europe, I do not recommend it, no. But if you are in the U.S., they still have some good bonds available.
Hope that helps :)
Thanks for the review!
I have two questions:
1. You mention that 0.5% fees are not that great. Where do you recommend investing in ETFs for lower fees?
2. I have been in contact with Vermögenszentrum (VZ) to set up an account for a portfolio. Do you have experience with that – Would you recommend VZ?
Hi Peter,
1. All Vanguard ETFs have lower than 0.5% fees. They are not the only ones, ishares have pretty good ETFs as well. You can take a look at justetf.com.
2. I do not have any experience with VZ directly. Do they offer a broker account? I am using IB and I would recommend either IB or DEGIRO.
Thanks for stopping by!
I don’t think they offer a tool to do your own trading, you would need to call them.
You can open an account there and choose a strategy (however risky u want it) for your portfolio (stocks, bonds, etc) – they handle the rest. There’s pre defined strategies you can choose from or you can adjust it yourself.
Then they look for the best options throughout all available offers in Switzerland and bundle it in your portfolio. For that you pay 0.55% p.a. and you can set up automatic payments. Pretty much hassle free but more traditional.
They claim to be independent as they look for best options out on the market for you.
They also do automatic rebalancing of your portfolio (e.g.: you chose 60% stocks, but stocks are up and make up 70% of ur portfolio value, so they sell parts and invest it in your other portfolio items to balance stock value back to 60%) – not sure if that’s good. What do you think?
It seems interesting for people that do not want to handle their investments themselves.
0.55% is not too bad if that’s all. But you probably have to include other fees as well: stamp tax duty and ETF fees at least.
Make sure you ask them for the entire set of fees you are going to pay before you agree to anything.
Okay. Thanks a lot!
They claim 0.55% are all fees whatsoever for handling everything (except extra trades u want to make).
Hi Peter,
If it’s really 0.55% fees, then it’s quite alright. But I am still pretty sure the internal fees will account for about 0.2% at least more.
But in any case, if you do not want to invest yourself, about 0.75% fees is still in the lows you can obtain in Switzerland.
Cheers