The Discerning Investor

The Discerning Investor gives you the tools to prepare for retirement on your own terms. Written by a lawyer who is now investment counsel, this book will help you develop a personal portfolio management strategy and make informed decisions about how to manage your investments.

The goal of The Discerning Investor is to give you the tools to prepare for retirement on your own terms. Part I lays out a conceptual framework for managing a retirement portfolio, with an emphasis on anticipating and thus avoiding mistakes such as misjudging risk. It sets out the basics of personal portfolio management and walks you through how to parse some common metrics and types of market data. Part II focuses on the "personal" part of personal portfolio management and provides a framework for developing an investment strategy to fit your particular situation.

Part III covers the pros and cons of two different approaches to portfolio management: 1) retaining a firm to manage everything, or 2) managing your portfolio yourself and using a brokerage firm to execute trades. Part IV comes back to personalization and offers self-assessment tools to help you flesh out your investment strategy and move from planning to action.

This is a book for investors who happen to be lawyers, written by a lawyer who happens to be investment counsel. The author's unique perspective and expertise are particularly apparent in her detailed overview of Form CRS, a disclosure document mandated by the SEC which was first rolled out in June 2020. Whether you are managing your portfolio yourself or retaining a firm to manage it for you, Form CRS can help you to quickly grasp what your client experience might be like with a given brokerage or investment firm based on its service offerings and the conflicts embedded in the way it does business. This book gives you all the information you will need to use this new and valuable tool to ensure that your investment portfolio is in good hands.