"A fool and his money" is the story of buyers remorse of one very lucky investor, who walked away with 50 percent of his money. Zero game means one person is a winner and another person is a loser. John got a bad taste, as he discovered the hazards of his margin being called and being forced too come up with 8600 dollars, too cover his investments and learned once again the average investor can not afford too invest. Bottom line, the lucky disappear into anomity, no one knows there name only their story; the losers feed the winners; and the winners are always looking for new losers.

John made a few mistakes, acted on weak advice, and held on too long after realizing his mistake. John gave some very insightful information about mutal fund managers. At the time of the book 9200 fund managers were controlling 75 percent of the wealth. John says, mutal fund managers don't outperform the averages because they collaborate between each other on selection. Outperformance is shunned because it distinquishes one mutal fund manager above another and makes the other look bad; and his claim for why mutal fund managers don't beat the average.

The Federal Reserve buy Bonds and use bonds too control the money supply. The Bonds represent assets which banks can loan money against increasing the available money supply to the consumer. If inflation increases, the Fed sells Bonds decreasing the money supply and increasing the interest rate. So, the Fed regulates inflations by controlling the amount of money supply.

This book was first published in 1988, after the 1987 crash. The wisdom and essence of the book is still as valuable now in 2002. It is entertaining as well as educational. The author went out of his way to describe his experience or experiments in various areas of investing, giving knowledge and first hand information on how the investment world runs from different perspectives. The author took a year to study investing and invest with his real money, with the assignment of writing this book about it at the end. As a result, his investment decisions and variety and frequency of his investment may be atypical of an average investor. However, his description of the phychology of an average investor is quite accurate.

Normally I would check the Amazon rating before I read a book. The average rating of this was 4.5 and so I picked it. I dont know whether I am not an average investor or what, I dont take it interesting nor helpful nor amusing nor.... Mr. Rothchild did try to write something good for his target readers with a different style and angle, something I can appreciate. However, something important, say lessons/points noteworthy for his readers, are absent. You read it but you can forget the content real fast.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Whilst Rothchild is not giving out specific advice on the stock market, he does provide a good general overview by relating his one year's journey into the stock market. A clear message from this book was that the "experts" are incorrect more often than not and that there is more rumour than fact floating around.

Written with a lot of honesty, great humour, and most definitely worth reading.

Thoroughly enjoyable and more than just slightly humorous, Rothchild takes Finance 101 and compresses it into "a year in the life of...". The text gives an uninitiated investor a chance to read about the mistakes, which are only too easy to make, before actually making them. While Rothchild does not actually give any advice on what one should do (as opposed to the advice on what to avoid), I'd highly recommend this book as a method of sparing ones self the pain these lessons help you avoid.