Book Review

I was introduced to Richard Ferri, the author of The ETF Book at the World Series of Indexing. Despite his channeling my mother in telling me "you're no one until you've written a book" I think The ETF Book has a lot of utility.

I'm not sure if this is intended this way or not but I think it will be most useful as a reference book. The first couple of hundred pages is a soup to nuts text book of everything you could think of pertaining to ETFs that isn't already stale.

There is also a fair bit devoted to all sorts of strategies using ETFs. The strategy section though did not strike me as anything but text book but the book is comprehensive in this regard. It provides the building blocks to then move on to more advanced concepts.

There is a big section with sample portfolios that although not innovative again provides building blocks.

If anything is missing I would say there is not much in the way of conclusions drawn. There are some conclusions and forward looking thought but not a lot.

One little pet peeve is that there are several references to using currency ETFs to hedge a vacation to Europe. I may be totally wrong on this but hedging a vacation seems like something no one is going to do. I think most people pay for vacation on a credit card or as they go out of their checking account.

Although the tone of the review may seem negative the value as a reference book is very high.