cover image Becoming Rich: The Wealth-Building Secrets of the World's Master Investors Buffett, Icahn, Soros

Becoming Rich: The Wealth-Building Secrets of the World's Master Investors Buffett, Icahn, Soros

Mark Tier. St. Martin's Press, $24.95 (358pp) ISBN 978-0-312-33986-9

The world is full of get-rich-quick schemes, but this definitely isn't one of them. Instead, Tier, founder of World Money Analyst, a newsletter with subscribers in 119 countries, teaches readers to invest smartly by delving into the skills, philosophies and investment strategies of some of the world's richest self-made men-Warren Buffett (Berkshire Hathaway, Inc.), Carl Icahn (Ichan & Co.) and George Soros (Quantum Fund) among them. An Australian who lives in Hong Kong, Tier has written other books about finance, including Understanding Inflation and The Nature of Market Cycles, but here it's all about analyzing and replicating the habits of his idols, whom he calls ""Master Investors."" Part biography and part self-help, the book will appeal most to serious investors for whom investing is a near full-time job. For those enthusiasts, chapters like ""The Seven Deadly Investment Sins"" and ""You Call That A Position"" will be entertaining, and ""The 23 Winning Investment Habits"" in Appendix I will likely become a mantra. But even casual investors can glean some good tips from this well-organized book, which points out that the Losing Investor always aims ""to make a lot of money"" while the Master Investor always keeps preservation of capital as ""priority No. 1.""