Financial First Aid for Canadian Investors by Michael Graham, Bryan Snelson and Cindy David

Imagine that you are at a dinner party and a guest starts talking in a slightly annoying voice. Given that you are interested in the subject matter -- i.e. how to improve your investment portfolio -- you ignore the awkward speech and concentrate on what is being said. After about 10 minutes, you must admit that the speaker knows what he is talking about, and that some of his advice is quite useful. As the evening progresses, however, you can't overlook the occasional cliché, nor hide the fact that your fellow guest sometimes sounds like a professor reading a dictionary. At the conclusion of the evening, while driving home, you recall some of the insights that you heard, and agree that the speaker made several excellent points. But then you remember the annoying voice, his sometimes rambling babble, and those weird moments when he would refer to himself in the third person.

Reading this book is a little like listening to such a dinner guest. On the plus side, Financial First Aid offers many great tips on how to improve as an investor. From what questions to ask when picking a financial advisor, to a good summary of the different strategies that an investor should engage in when buying stocks, bonds, insurance and other financial products, there are many useful parts to this book. I also appreciated the chapters that outline the common errors that investors make, the strong tips on how to research a company, and the practical summary on what fees investors have to pay when investing, and how to minimize these fees.

This good advice, however, is undermined by an occasionally annoying writing style. In too many parts, the text reads like a newsletter rather than a book, which is made worse by a weird tendency of the authors to refer to themselves in the third person. I understand that the use of the third person is sometimes necessary when a book is written by multiple authors, but when overdone (as in this case), the result is a tone that comes across as part-cocky and part-schizoid.

If you want to read a useful book that contains practical advice for the Canadian investor then this is a good choice. But if you do read this book, be prepared to be annoyed by the occasional boilerplate statement, some chapters that read more like a power point presentation than a book, and the overuse of the third person.

3 out of 5 stars