Oblivious Investing – Building Wealth by Ignoring the Noise Book Review

I had the opportunity to review Mike Piper’s newest book, “Oblivious Investing: Building Wealth by Ignoring the Noise.*”  Mike is the author of a great blog of the same name, Oblivious Investing.

The book follows conversations between Shannon, the investing newbie and her wise Uncle Toby.  Every conversation they have starts with small talk and turns to an investing topic, and the chapters are conveniently titled as such.

As one could guess from the title, Oblivious Investing is all about passive investing with index funds.  Throughout the book is the overtone that almost as important as passive index fund investing is the need to ignore the noise.  This only makes his cover more bad ass (does the use of the words “bad ass” disqualify my book review? I hope note, cause it is easily the best logo in all of PF Blogger land).

While I dislike the strained conversations between Shannon and Uncle Toby (one example I can think of is when Shannon called up Toby to talk about investing and he puts her off for a hockey game) I can see how it is useful for those reading the book as someone who doesn’t live in the Personal Finance/Investing world – WHICH IS THE PERSON WHO THIS BOOK IS WRITTEN FOR!

My favorite chapter was about finding your “Uncle Toby”  someone that will keep you in check with the markets ups and down.  Mike does not dismiss financial advisors that make money from commissions, which is the norm in the personal finance blogging world; instead, Mike indicates that each payment method (Assets under Management, Commissions, & Fee based) as their own place depending on the situation.

Would I Recommend Oblivious Investing: Building Wealth by Ignoring the Noise?

I would 100% recommend Oblivious Investing: Building Wealth by Ignoring the Noise for people that are interested in learning the basics.