by Beate Sander was one of the books I approached with mixed feelings. Because on the one hand I had already heard a lot of positive, but on the other hand also a lot of negative about this book. And in the end, I was also ambivalent about how I should rate it.
First of all, I would like to express my gratitude once again to Beate Sander before the review. In the last years of her life, she fought for the culture of shares and stock markets in Germany like no other person. With her mass of publications, whole bookshelves can be filled and even in the BILD newspaper she provided with her column for lobbying for the self-responsible handling of the topic of finance.
Her stock and stock market guide should be the standard work for stock market beginners. In the subtitle, she herself writes about the license to invest money. From the outside, the book looks very high-quality and appealing at first glance. The weight is also enormous, which is usually a good sign. Like all other books by Beate Sander, it offers a combination of small chapters with content, dozens of sample portfolios for cautious, success-oriented and risk-averse investors, very large FAQ sections and various self-tests on the subject of stock market knowledge.
With this work, she tries to cover all the important areas of investment: from portfolio management to different asset classes to ETFs, fundamental analysis, chart technology and stock market psychology. Actually already in the approach an unsolvable task with only scarcely 350 sides.
Of course, this book teaches an enormous amount of valuable things for beginners. It describes roughly how the stock market works, what shares, funds, ETFs, bonds and so on are, but beyond that, some passages are at least debatable. For example, penny stocks are recommended to beginners as an addition to their portfolio, and elsewhere there is a somewhat inaccurate report on the use of various ratios such as the P/E ratio. A few phrases leave me with a lurid impression, just like a multitude of stock photos, polarizing caricatures, loud headlines and the ever-swimming smell of quick riches.
The simplistic approach in all honor, this book loses for me in many places unfortunately the liability. Whether such a layout and headlines like "Viagra for the portfolio" are so suitable for beginners everyone must decide for themselves. What bothered me, however, were the quite a few inaccuracies in the content and partly risky simplifications of more than risky asset classes. These are definitely not a good breeding ground for stock market beginners.
So I am ambivalent: Can one make nevertheless clearly more from this book. Because the chosen language is very easy to understand, ideal for beginners - with the exception of the lurid titles - and also the rough topic outline is appropriately chosen. But in my opinion - especially in books for beginners - you simply don't have to provide a false, inaccurate or misleading picture of the stock market and instead rather pile on deeper and don't evoke a gold rush mood.
I take my hat off to the life's work of Beate Sander, but this book, while good, is not a very good work for me.