I ended up finally finishing Get Smarter: Life and Business Lessons by Seymour Schulich (non-affiliate link). Schulich is a millionaire best known for his association with various resource companies and is a well-known philanthropist in the Toronto area (the York University MBA school is named after him). The book is basically divided into bite-sized chapter offering advice on different topics. Thus, you can open the book at any chapter and just start reading. Some really interesting life advice (love is a chemical reaction that fades; in the end, all you should have is loyalty and mutual respect- wow, what a romantic!) but I picked out some great nuggets of investing wisdom including (to paraphrase):

1. Don’t invest just because you have money sitting around. You tend to get into bad investments that way. He used a good example of Buffet sitting on money after he sold his business and then finally buying stock on the cheap thus beginning a very long and famous career.
2. At the end of the day, the most important indicator in a business is the amount of cash they have on hand; great advice for both entrepreneurs- look at cash and not sales!- and investors- you cannot fake cash in the financial statements.
3. Buy assets which are inflation protected such as real estate and commodities.
4. You can only know a few countries well so concentrate on them when you invest (actually this one is from Jim Pattison, who owns half of British Columbia).
5. Look at long term historical trends and not the short term to provide a guide to investing.

A good book.

A couple links of links for your weekend reading pleasure:

1. Globe and Mail lists 5 dividend stocks which aren’t banks.
2. Million Dollar Journey addresses how much to tip? Quite appropriate this time of the year (check out the comments for a general over-view)
3. Don’t know what to do with all those horrible holiday presents? Finance and Fat writes about turning junk into cash

Have a great weekend. Don’t burn out those credit cards shopping!