THE WOLF OF INVESTING

The author of The Wolf of Wall Street offers a blustery argument for evading the fast-buck parasites of the finance world in favor of long-term investment.

In this overlong, anecdote-filled text, Belfort draws a sharp line between smart investing and dumb speculation. It’s ironic that in a book that decries snake-oil salesmen, the author writes early on that he “will show you how to deploy your hard-earned money in a safe, secure, and highly deliberate way that will allow you to…consistently beat 95 percent of the top-performing hedge fund managers and mutual fund managers in the world.” Studded with most of George Carlin’s seven forbidden words, Belfort’s narrative delivers a good amount of valuable information for readers seeking to bypass financial advisers and do the work themselves. The author explains in detail how an ordinary investor can learn to properly value a stock, understanding that value to be a function of many variables that Wall Street claims to be insider knowledge but that can be found with a minimum of searching of public sources; and understanding the numbers on the stock tickers to be expressions of the familiar laws of supply and demand. A key takeaway: “Wall Street, as a whole, [is] completely full of shit and [does] not deserve all the fees they [are] charging,” since anyone can outperform the majority of investment advisers by following some simple rules. It wouldn’t be sporting to reveal them here, and Belfort’s book is well worth reading just to get at sharply pointed adages such as this: “Both history and mathematics have proven that passive, long-term investing is a far better investment strategy than active, short-term trading.”

NSFW, to be sure, but a useful handbook for those planning their financial futures.