Book of the week: The Investment Answer by Gordon Murray and Daniel Goldie

(Business Plus, $18)

Faced with terminal cancer, former Wall Street heavy hitter Gordon Murray didn’t “buy an island” or “move to Paris,” said Ron Lieber in The New York Times. Instead, he devoted his energy to co-writing a slim investing guide meant to spread the word that active money management—a practice to which he owed his career—is not a good strategy for most individual investors.

The guide’s ideas aren’t new, said Fred Yager in ConsumerAffairs.com. It tells investors to divvy up their assets across a diverse mix of funds and rebalance only “now and then” by selling winners and loading up on losers. But this “hardly unique” message means a lot coming from Murray, who was surprisingly clueless about personal investing until his friend Daniel Goldie, an investment advisor, opened his eyes. The guide the friends wrote together could become “one of the best-selling self-published books of all time.”

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