Bookstrapping - The wolf of investing: My playbook for making a fortune on wall street by Jordan Belfort

Money, humour and the seven sins

Anyone who has watched the film ‘The Wolf on Wall Street’ knows that the most colourful language is to be expected from this book. For example, a person loses money like a ‘fart in the wind.’ That smells awful, doesn’t it?

Here’s a book by Jordan Belfort, the man, the investor, the iconoclast in his avatar as a 'guide'. Now his very name brings up Leonardo Di Caprio in our minds, who played him impeccably in the movie! And of course Matthew McConaughey, whose chest thumping in the movie must not be forgotten!

Here are our five Bookstrapping insights -

1. The basic premise of the book is this - Belfort’s brother-in-law Fernando lost nearly a $1,00,000 dollars in the stock market. Jordan took it upon himself to resuscitate him. Now when you plug into this story, a few allied sub-plots open up and voila and if you’re attentive, you learn lessons from a success story who knows how to make money on wall street.

2. Can a trader have timing worse than ‘Napoleon invading Russia in the dead of winter’? Possibly! Can you trade like a wild banshee? What’s the greatest fool theory? What is the Wall Street Fee Machine Complex? Dive in to experience language that is colourful from the word go!

3. Chapter 11 is vital - especially if you want to learn how not to top-tick or bottom-tick a stock. How do you catch a stock in the middle run and make money without losing it all?

4. Some time ago, we had reviewed a book by Pulak Prasad, where he spoke about Darwin, biology and investing. Investing seems to extend to every discipline of study. Belfort quotes scientist Albert Einstein who said, “He who understands compound interest will forever earn it; he who doesn’t understand it will forever pay it.” Simply put, explains Belfort, “Both history and mathematics have proven that passive, long-term investing is a far better investment strategy than active, short-term trading.”

5. In essence, this book is for readers seeking to bypass financial advisers and do the work themselves.

And while all the above is true, knowing what is ‘yours to do’ in the trading game is the key. As Warren Buffet famously said,“Listen, if you’re wife’s going to have a baby, you’d do better to call the obstetrician than to deliver it yourself.” In investments, as in life, the best thing seems to be to know what is yours to do.