Accelerate Your Wealth: It’s Your Money, Your Choice

Arguably, the widespread use of 401k contributions propelled a large number of working Americans to invest in the stock market. This led to greater interest in learning about the workings of the financial markets, help with picking stocks or funds, and ultimately matching individual investment portfolios to one’s financial goals and risk tolerance. Like many others, this book reveals how to maximize one’s returns.

Long held advice on investing includes spending less than one’s earnings and investing the rest, having a long-term investment horizon, which is especially applicable to those who are just entering the workforce, and not investing in securities that are more volatile than your risk tolerance. These are brought up in this book, but they are well-trodden ground and generally covered in most presentations given by one’s 401k plan administrator, usually at one’s place of employment. Other common themes include dollar-cost-averaging and diversification. This book gives the same advice, except the author discourages against dollar-cost-averaging. The example given against dollar-cost-averaging would apply to investing in a specific stock, but not in a market or sector over the long term.

There is more divergence among experts, making it possible to build an appropriate portfolio. This book covers that aspect, and necessarily has to provide general guidelines. The path to apply general guidelines to one’s specific goals and risk tolerance could be better explored to provide more specific guidelines and help readers build portfolios suited to their investment profile. The book does provide questions and worksheets to determine one’s investment profile, but it could delve deeper on how to effectively use that profile to build a portfolio.

The financial securities analysis looks as both technical and fundamental analysis. Given the intended audience and size of such a work, this portion is unlikely to be deep or extensive. By covering both technical and fundamental analysis, the book is unable to provide the breath or depth in either. As with other books on building wealth through investment, readers with investment experience will find areas to disagree with the author and areas of general agreement. However the material covered is fairly well-known, well-distributed, and generally in keeping with Modern Portfolio Theory.