Book of the Month: Step By Step Investing

Step by Step Investing:  A Beginner's Guide to 

the Best Investments in Stocks

Summary

Step by Step Investing is a  short book that encourages readers to get their finances in order, determine their goals and then to invest.  

For a book that is ostensibly about investing in stocks, little of the book is dedicated to teaching readers how to pick the best stocks.  Rather, Hogue encourages people to put the majority of their investment dollars in ETFs.  

However, Hogue does devote some time to explaining what some of the major statistics such as PE ratio, bid-ask spread, beta, and sales volume mean to the average investor.  

This is one of three Step By Step Investing books. 

Readability

While I read far faster than the average person, I finished Step by Step Investing in an hour while walking on a treadmill.  I doubt Hogue would encourage most of his readers to do that because each chapter ends with action steps--things you should do to prepare yourself to invest in the stock market, and things to do after you have invested.  Obviously, I did not do them  while on the treadmill, however, most are things that my husband and I have done over the years.  Some examples are:

• Read through each investing rule [the rules are discussed in the chapter] and think about how it applies to your plan and your needs;
•  Decide how much of your portfolio you will invest in stocks, bonds and real estate
• Commit to only checking your portfolio value at set intervals.  

Nevertheless, the book was interesting and easy to read.

Is Step by Step Investing Worth the Money?

If you know nothing about investing in general and investing in the stock market in particular, Hogue's book is a good introduction.  Joseph Houge is blogger and the writing style is similar to that you see on blogs.  Hogue does not claim to have any secrets that will gain you an overnight fortune, which to me bolsters his credibility.  

If you are an experienced investor you may learn something new.  I liked Hogue's explanation of the difference between a mutual fund and an ETF and why he preferred ETFs.  I know that ETFs are the "in" thing now, I've just never been able to figure out why they were preferable to mutual funds.  Hogue's explanation made sense.

What this book will not do is tell you how to conduct an in-depth review of a company to determine whether buying stock in it at its current price is a good idea.  

The book is available as a Kindle download for $2.99, which I think is a reasonable price for the size and quality of the book.  I understand that self-publishing print books is expensive, but for the $6.99 Hogue charges for the paperback, I would expect a more in-depth, longer book.  

Rating of Step by Step Investing

You can check my book blog to get a better idea of what my ratings means.  I'm giving Step by Step Investing a B.  It was interesting and readable, however, it was shorter and contained less information than I would expect in a book. 

Source of Step by Step Investing

This month I am a Kindle Unlimited member and Step by Step Investing is one of the books available to members under their pay one price monthly membership.

Take Action:

Since the books I will be reviewing on this site all deal with personal finance in one way or another, I am going to include a "take action" section in each review.  That action will be at least one thing I will do as a result of reading the reviewed book.  A month later I will report, via another post, exactly what I did and what results (if any) I had.  

My take action as a result of this book will be to compare some Vanguard ETFs that are similar to our Vanguard Mutual Funds and see what the differences in performance are, and decide whether we want to switch at least some of our money from mutual funds to ETFs.  

The book links in this post are Amazon Associate links.  If you click them and purchase from Amazon, I get a small commission.