Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)I am not familiar with Schilling but he manages money and writes a newsletter from a quick perusal of his website. However, the book states that he does not yet manage money (but he is already a bit old). The book is really in three parts:
1. The first third of the books deals with recommendations the author made to his clients roughly from 1988 to 2008. Clearly the author is a bit full of himself here. That is allowed because he seems to have made some good calls. I suppose the author needs to establish his track record somehow. However, most people wouldn't find this section terribly interesting. At least the author has made a decent job editing the text, which presumably originates from his newsletter. However, the section might be interesting for life-long students that want to understand the author's thought process in more detail. For those a key problem is that he only discusses his successful predictions. Maybe he has loads of predictions that didn't pan out. So while there is value in history, this section is problematic.
2. The second third deals with themes that currently preoccupies the author. We are not going to see anything like the bull market which lasted from 1982 to 2000. Instead we'll get deflation. This discussion is quite interesting. However, this is a contrarian viewpoint so I would really have liked more depth and crispness in the arguments. He should also address the contents of his 1998 book called "Deflation", because if he has called "deflation" for over a decade her will lose credibility.
3. The final third deals with investment recommendations for the next decade. I'm not terribly impressed by this section. Some of these recommendations are a bit naive, like don't buy antiques because they're illiquid. Other ideas are clearly more serious, like buy consumer staples stocks. The nagging question is that I don't know if the author still keeps his best ideas exclusive to his newsletter subscribers. I would have liked the author to raise this issue himself.
The language is not very technical at all. I think most people who end up reading my review can easily read the book. Personally I find the book very verbose. He is kind of writing to a not-so-knowledgeable wealthy person. If you have some basic economics courses under your belt, some of the book will feel quite tedious.
Judging the quality of non-fiction is different from judging a novel. I really don't like the verbose style of writing, so style is equivalent to two stars. However, it is really the insights and quality of recommendations that is the important. For problems listed above that is three or four stars. So in conclusion three stars (i.e. useful if you read many books, but certainly not your first choice on the topic).
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