Book Review > Shares Made Simple: A beginner’s guide to sharemarket success

Roger Kinsky is a tutor of share investing, online investing and business technology and this is the tenth book he has published.

The book is well laid out and easy to navigate with a summary of the key points at the end of each chapter. It builds up in complexity from explaining about shares themselves through to his six principles of share investing and then how to select a portfolio of shares. Towards the end of the book he demonstrates how to trade at the right price and at the right time and ends with the important area of keeping records of your trades and your portfolio.

Roger does start out fairly simplistically, for someone who already has some knowledge of shares, but then he covers some useful points about share selection, timing of share trades and managing your share portfolio.

One area of the book that is a bit harder to understand, for the beginner, is the chapter on timing of share trades where he delves into technical analysis without a lot of explanation. This is an area which has had many texts and courses to cover the topic and Roger has introduced, and utilised the technique in the book, without necessarily bringing the reader along with him.

I really liked the areas Roger covers in chapter 5, which he then covers in more detail in the chapters that follow, his six principles of share trading:

1. Compound share investments
2. Diversify investments
3. Shares with good fundamentals are best
4. Trading at the right price
5. Trading at the right time is key (and difficult); and
6. Regularly monitoring and reviewing your portfolio

Roger pulls it all together in chapters 12 and 13 – putting the plan into action and keeping up to date. From the starting point of a beginner, this is good advice on how to select and manage your shares.

One of the downfalls, from an investor’s point of view, is that there is an assumption that a share portfolio is the best area for investment. However the book is, of course, all about shares and share trading and from that point view it covers the field very well, particularly from a beginner’s perspective guiding them from setting up to ongoing management of a diversified share portfolio.

Brian Cordiner is a member of the AIA.