Review of The Sharesies Guide To Investing

When I pre-ordered Girls That Invest by Simran Kaur, I also pre-ordered The Sharesies Guide to Investing. The book was fairly delayed though so I had heaps of time to read Girls That Invest first. But here’s finally my review of The Sharesies Guide to Investing!

About the authors

The Sharesies Guide to Investing is a team effort by Brooke and Leighton Roberts and Sonya Williams, who form a part of the founding team of Sharesies, a New Zealand micro-investing platform (although Sharesies is available in Australia as well).

Sonya Williams has a background in marketing for technology companies and also experience working in a bank, which sparked her interest in money and fintech.

Both Leighton and Brooke have background in product management and finance, Leighton having formed an investment club in his teen years already.

They saw a gap in the market, in the form of more accessible investment platform, and thus Sharesies was born.

What is The Sharesies Guide to Investing about

As the name of the book suggests, The Sharesies Guide to Investing is a book written to help you understand investing and to give you confidence to start.

It shares the story behind the start of Sharesies and how the founders found themselves on this path.

There are 10 chapters, with investor stories included in most of them and a little summary of the chapter in the end to recap the key points made.

Some of the chapters included are:

• Why invest (And what is investing anyway?)
• What to invest in
• How to cope with a downturn
• The rest of your financial life
• … and more

Sharesies Guide to Investing focuses on investing in shares, and should be considered as general information only, not personal advice.

My review of The Sharesies Guide to Investing

Before reading the book I wondered how biased it would be towards using the Sharesies platform for investing and whether it was just a sales pitch to get readers to sign up.

I was positively surprised though!

While Sharesies’ history was explained and some platform features mentioned, I felt that the emphasis was on educating the reader about investing in general rather than trying to get users on the platform.

The Sharesies Guide to Investing was very easy to read and definitely beginner friendly with all jargon explained.

I feel that all the important basics were covered from what shares are, how you can make money from them, to mindset around investing (among other things), so the book will give the reader a great knowledge base to start investing.

One negative thing I found was that the information didn’t really flow the best in some parts of the book.

I felt like the authors had tried to include everything they could think that would be of value (a great thing on its own!), but it resulted in some sections jumping from topic to topic rather than flowing nicely from topic to topic.

It’s somewhat understandable though as investing is such a big topic and like I said, they have tried to include as much as they can (I felt).

All in all, it is just a very minor complaint about this book I have and doesn’t massively affect readability or take away from the message The Sharesies Guide to Investing is trying to deliver.

I can definitely recommend this book to anyone who is a complete newbie to investing or have already tapped their toes in but want to understand more!

Would you be keen to read The Sharesies Guide to Investing?