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You know Duncan Bannatyne. Okay, not the name perhaps, but you know the man. The accent.
Come on, you remember – the scary one on BBC2’s Dragon’s Den? The bloke who sounds moments away from thumping the next entrant who wants £100,000 for a 10% stake in their snake charming business?
The great triumph of Bannatyne’s Anyone Can Do It, the new paperback edition of which I’ve just read cover to cover, is that it transforms its subject from a man you’d avoid outside a pub to a man you’d love to share a pint with.
Bannatyne – perhaps we should call him Duncan, which sounds more human, less like an enforcement robot out of Robocop, and so suits the person in this book better – is certainly not the first Scot from a dark corner of Glasgow to be hastily judged by his consonant dropping speech-cum-warcry. Hell, to sensitive English ears even the posher denizens of Edinburgh can sound like they’re giving you ten seconds to run for it.
But in Bannatyne (Duncan’s) case, first impressions couldn’t be more misleading, as this revelation of a book makes clear.
“Do as I do, not as I say” is a useful maxim in life. It’s one instinctively understood by children (”But daddy, you ate three packets of crisps and YOU never clean YOUR room – it’s unfair!”) and politicians (”But you, Snouty and Fatcat already have knighthoods – it’s unfair!”).
But can mimicking the wealthy really make you rich?
“The simple truth is that wealthy people tend to understand and do things the rest of us don’t. From mindsets to actual actions, they follow behavioural rules when it comes to their wealth and these rules are what separate them from everybody else.”
Everybody else except, potentially, purchasers of The Rules of Wealth, because within its pages Templar sets out what he claims are 100 behaviours you can copy to make yourself wealthy, too.
It’s seductive: steal from the rich and you’ll become rich yourself. And it’s laudable in that Templar’s 100 Rules are often so common sensical and all-encompassing that it’s hard to argue with them. Work hard, save your money, shun debt – hear, hear, we say.
The only tricky bit is working out what’s an enriching action, and what’s a byproduct of previous money-making behaviour.
Richard Farleigh has made a lot of money via the markets – tens of millions, maybe hundreds. This book doesn’t give a precise number, though we do learn that the Australian investor’s first ambition was to be a bushranger like Ned Kelly. (Think highwayman Dick Turpin with a bucket on his head. Not so far removed from some institutional investors, a cynic might suggest…)
Farleigh has also had two recent doses of TV fame – briefly as a moneyman from Monaco in Trouble at the Top, a business show that focused on the Home House members’ club in London he helped set up, and via a stint on the thinking man’s X Factor, BBC2’s Dragon’s Den.
In the modern world, of course, the TV outings outweigh self-made millions as a reason to get a book deal; Ant and Dec could probably release a best-selling book on money, if they weren’t so busy making it. And for his part, Farleigh has the boyish looks and the charm to give the boys from Byker’s Grove a run for their money.
With its cover length shot of the smiling author and a slightly dumbed-down title (it was originally released as Taming the Lion in 2005), it’s hard to not to open Farleigh’s 100 Secret Strategies for Successful Investing expecting day-glo stickers and a My First Investment wallchart to fall out.
But that’d be unfair, and not only because Farleigh was by far the nicest investor ever to grace the Den.
Don’t smirk: Settling down with a good book on investment can be oddly soothing. As the light dawns over your financial blackspots, panic is replaced by calm. Before long you’re scanning the Financial Times with aplomb, and even reading the small print. (Well, not all the time: I’m currently enjoying Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows).
With that in mind, I’m going to recommend a few favourite books that I think will at the very least make (or save) you more money than they cost.
In the mid-1990s I visited a friend who’d moved to New York to work on Wall Street. He was involved in arcane research far from the trading action, but despite this he seemed to have plugged into a new understanding of money, and how it made everything in the economy tick. He’d be grabbing cabs between the main and pudding courses at restaurants to take his clothes to the dry cleaners, and explaining over his shoulder that it saved him approximately 23% compared to his hourly wage rate to do this, or some such nonsense.
It was clearly ridiculous, but also a rather impressive way to think. He went further too. He would walk past shops and predict which special offers would work, and which wouldn’t, and explain why. And he knew why popcorn was sold for $5 at the cinema, despite costing $0.50 from the corner shop outside.
I put his money obsession down to the ‘big swinging dicks’ that he was hanging out with on Wall Street. Actually, it later transpired he hated his job and was launching a secret career during snack breaks, and reading The Armchair Economist while waiting for his research results to compile. I only found out the source of his newfound financial nous after he airmailed this paperbook book to me when he left New York.
I devoured The Armchair Economist over a weekend (it’s a very easy read) and proceeded to plague my friends with talk of it like it were a new girlfriend – just like my friend had with me – for a fortnight. Although I did keep to doing my own laundry…
After this dizzying spell, the book quietly drifted into the background, and ever since I’ve taken everything it taught me for granted (just like, alas, a not-so-new girlfriend…)
In short: To understand how economics can help explain every facet of society and many of our subconscious everyday decisions – in a fun way – I firmly recommend The Armchair Economist (which you can buy now from Amazon). You’ll be nutty for a week or two after reading it, but wiser for life!
, a neatly packaged book that will doubtless make him millions, the best-selling author says:
expecting day-glo stickers and a My First Investment wallchart to fall out.
