Precious Metals Investing For Dummies
- ISBN13: 9780470130872
- Condition: USED – VERY GOOD
- Notes:
Product Description
In recent years, metals have been among the safest and most lucrative investments around, but they are not entirely risk free. Before you begin investing or trading in metals, you need authoritative information and proven investment strategies. You need Precious Metal Investing For Dummies. This straightforward guide eases you into the precious metals market with sound advice on trading and owning these profitable investments, including gold, silver, platinum… More >>
Precious Metals Investing For Dummies
I don’t expect much from a “For Dummies” book but this book under delivered. There just wasn’t enough content to make me feel like I got my money’s worth.
Rating: 1 / 5
What I was really hoping for was more detailed than this book could deliver. However, as far as the history of mineral commodities and an overview, this is a great place to start. I strongly recommend this book for its basic historical perspective. So, what is missing? How about a forecast of things to come?
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Rating: 4 / 5
Interesting book. I was thinking of buying gold as an investment and wanted to do some research.
Rating: 4 / 5
If you dont mind the title of this book. But as I think of it. This title does fit nicely. I am a dummy when it comes to Precious Metals. This book has a lot of very useful information. It also has a wealth of reference links. Very easy to understand. Does not make it tooo boring like some other books that I have read. This book also shows you past history on the performance of the Metals. Wish I knew about investing back in 2000. But don’t we all. All I can say is I will be investing for the long term NOW. Great Book. I have picked up more books on this subject.
Rating: 5 / 5
It’s easy to get mixed feelings about this book. It tries to cram everything together, history, categories of precious metals, reasons for booms & busts, strategies for investing, etc. It also tries to simplify and explain things in everyday language – it is a ‘dummies’ book after all. That’s all commendable.
However, somewhere in the process the book became full of errors like “gold is good in times of inflation” or that gold has intrinsic value of so-and-so (it has cultural store of wealth value with mania phases, not intrinsic value beyond it’s industrial use), etc.
This wouldn’t be so bad if so much of the advice given, like inflation hedging, wasn’t so bad, so clearly out of whack with actual historical data from the past 100 years and if the reasoning wasn’t so full of gold-bug mythology, a lot of which has been proven wrong by real historians, investors, traders and financial analysts. If the book had more graphs, many of the errors in the argumentation would be visible to even a casual reader. No wonder there are so few graphs.
Gold and precious metals are not a bad investment per se. One just has to understand how they function in different kind of circumstances. This book is not a reliable source to find that out, unless you already know your stuff and find the few gold nuggets from the rest of the mud in the book.
Not recommended, unless one knows the basics and by then it’s way too simplistic. Two stars, because it actually also has factually correct information that can be useful (on mining companies for example) and because it reminds people that it’s not just a question of “buy & hold and it’ll go through the roof forever”.
As a better partial alternative, I’d recommend The Goldwatcher: Demystifying Gold Investing by Katz and Holmes, although it’s strictly gold only. Sane, well edited, reasonably argued and full of good advice on actual trading and investing in gold.
Rating: 2 / 5