Review: Rule #1: The Simple Strategy for Successful Investing in Only 15 Minutes a Week!

Rule #1: The Simple Strategy for Successful Investing in Only 15 Minutes a Week! by Phil Town
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

I’d call this a blue collar investment guide. It is aimed at people early in their stock investing, ones that haven’t spent a lot of time and effort investigating and managing their investments. Given the author’s stories, he’s looking for those that threw some money at a stock or fund without much thought and got burned. The author even positions himself as “one of the guys”, repeating stories about his being a river tour guide and not mentioning more than in passing his career in hedge funds. The advice itself is typical of an investment guide from the 80s, think “One Up on Wall Street” with a bit more math. This runs counter to much of the recent and common investment practice of focusing on matching the market through buying market-spanning funds or ETFs. Instead of that tact, “Rule #1” suggests researching individual stocks. The author includes some basic fundamental company and stock price analysis, mixed with a dollop of subjectiveness based on a person’s familiarity with the stock or industry. The author then suggests market timing using simple technical analysis, buying and selling stocks on a regular basis.

A couple of things I didn’t like about this book. First, in the 9 disk CD audio version of this book, the author spends the entire first disc “teasing” the suggestions he gets around to making afterwards. This can be entirely skipped without missing anything of value. Second, like many books that suggest a process, this starts off very easy – Rule #1 is the only rule. But then you find additional steps are involved, then you find each step consists of more steps. It is a very involved process. And during the teasing part of the book, the author states it’s only 15 minutes a week to make all this money. Only near the end of the book does the author start to mention the hours of research that precede the period where you spend 15 minutes a week. And while there are plenty of opportunities to prove through data analysis that the process being suggested actually works, the author totally avoids providing proof of his partially objective process. After reading this and understanding the process being presented, I find that the way the story is told feels more like it is being told by a salesman, not quite telling the whole truth while ingratiating himself with his audience, than by an advisor just setting out the story. I tend to avoid books with this voice, and I tend to discount what they are (over) selling.

I am a bit of an old school investor. I feel there could be ways to invest in individual stocks and beat the market at times. So I’m primed for the story in this book. But I don’t appreciate the salesman tone, and I feel the lack of data shows the author cannot prove his process works. Nice for a step back to the 80s, though. We’ve come a long way as investors.


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