I wrote a new e-book

Baptiste Wicht

The Poor Swiss
Staff member
Hi

I have finished writing the e-book I have been talking about for a while: Invest Your Money In The Stock Market, by yourself, in Switzerland


I am sharing it here first to get early eyeballs. I would be interested in all your feedback:
* Does that sound useful?
* Does the page look okay?
* etc...

Thanks
 
Congrats!! 💪
Does that sound useful?
I think yes, for people new in the topic. I'm not sure how easy it will be to sell it to those people that go the long way of optimizing the costs and chose IBKR vs. those that just do Swissquote.

So from an economical perspective the userbase might be more price sensitive than usual (but probably people interested in FIRE in general). But time will tell.

The covered topics seem reasonable and if I wouldnt have read all your blogposts the recent year(s) and started my own IBKR adventure yet, I would likely buy it.

Page looks good for me on an Android. 👍
 
on kindle paperwhite the writing is small, but it's quite normal with a .pdf format. Paperwhite is made mostly for .epub or .mobi
 

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on kindle paperwhite the writing is small, but it's quite normal with a .pdf format. Paperwhite is made mostly for .epub or .mobi
Thanks for purchasing and testing!

Apparently, I can generate an epub from Google Docs, would you like to try it?
 
The covered topics seem reasonable and if I wouldnt have read all your blogposts the recent year(s) and started my own IBKR adventure yet, I would likely buy it.
Thanks for the feedback. And indeed, if you have already read all or even most of my blog posts, the ebook will not bring anything new.
I'm not sure how easy it will be to sell it to those people that go the long way of optimizing the costs and chose IBKR vs. those that just do Swissquote.
Are you saying that I could have more audience by using Swissquote instead of IBKR or that since people are optimizing, they are already ready?
So from an economical perspective the userbase might be more price sensitive than usual (but probably people interested in FIRE in general). But time will tell.
Absolutely. I don't really have much clue about pricing, I tried to find a good starting and wil go from there.
 
Are you saying that I could have more audience by using Swissquote instead of IBKR
Yes, I mean that if it would be a 'for Swissquote and IBKR' it might attract more people. I would think that many that have no idea about investing, and want to start the journey are somehow risk averse at first. I realized that whenever someone asks me about what I do, they are interested initially but quickly decide it is nothing for them/too risky/complicated once I tell them my broker is not Swiss.

They are often less price sensitive and wouldnt mind using Swissquote, and probably also might be more willing to pay for a useful resource as your ebook.

I could imagine like two parallel chapters. E.g. a 'Chapter 19A' for those that prefer a Swiss broker and 'Chapter 19B' for those that are determined to optimize fees/taxes the most.
 
I have added an option to download the epub instead of the PDF for people wanting to read on Kindle. Unfortunately, I can't pack them properly with the service I am using.
 
Hi,


Congratulations on finishing your e-book! It's great to hear that you're sharing your knowledge about investing in the stok market in Switzerland. I think this is a very usefull topic, especially for beginner investors. The page looks tidy, but may be adding some examples or case studies could attract more atention.

I look forward to your further updates and feedback from others. Your experiense could inspire many who want to start investing. Good luck!

Regards, David :-)
 
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Hey @Baptiste Wicht

Thanks a lot for the new book. I really appreciate your direct writing style, and how you explained your approach to choosing indices and corresponding ETFs. I've been meaning to for ages, but reading your book gave me the final push I needed to open an IBKR account and open some positions.

I do have a few pieces of feedback (constructive, I hope) on a few things that have tripped me up a bit:

1. During the account application process I entered 1 year of trading experience and something like 1-10 trades per year. It then said that this was not sufficient and that I needed to take an "exam" to get my account approved. I was not expecting this, and it made me fairly stressed. However, the exam turned out to be a set of fairly straightforward questions and actually it doesn't let you proceed until you give the correct answers. A heads up about this in the book might have relieved my anxiety somewhat.

2. I wanted to convert around 8k CHF into USD and buy VT with it, and so I followed your advice and manually converted the currency (since for such an amount it should be cheaper that automatic conversion). In the book it says that the order should be completely instantly, which was correct, but it also gave me the impression that I would be able to then buy the stock using the USD immediately. However, I faced a really strange problem which seems to be reported by others (see here and here). I tried to submit a market buy order for a number of shares that were definitely valued at less than the USD amount listed on my account after manual conversion (in my case ~9.3k USD) even accounting for the fees. However, IBKR was telling me I didn't have enough cash settled in order to make a trade. It also gave all the numbers in CHF which was super confusing since I'd already converted the CHF into USD. In the end I was able to make the trade go through by setting a USD amount that I wanted to buy (rather than a number of shares). However, when I looked at my orders I see that, without my knowledge, I had bought around 9.3k of USD.CHF and then immediately sold a similar amount of USD.CHF. It looks like it did some automatic conversion, in addition to the manual conversion I had performed earlier. After reading the linked posts, it seems like I should have waited up to 2 days for the manual conversion to go through. Anyway, I think it was a good learning experience for me but definitely gave me the impression that IBKR is too complicated for me and that I was out of my depth. I still don't really understand how this happened. Probably I should have just started with an automatic currency conversion, rather than try to do it manually. BTW my account is a Cash account (as advised in the book), but I noticed in some of the figures in the book that a Margin account is shown. I guess with a Margin account you wouldn't hit the problem.

3. I downloaded the epub format and the figures do not seem to display well either on my phone or on my laptop. Maybe it would have been better to download the PDF. It seems a bit strange to have to choose either PDF or epub before buying the book. I would ideally like to have both.

Thanks again for your great effort with the book. Despite facing the issues above, I am still very satisfied that I have finally taken the plunge and starting learning how to do it myself without going via a financial advisor etc.
 
@tdoublep

Thanks a lot for the feedback!

1) Excellent point, I will mention this in the e-book. You are right that it should be mentioned, since I tried to mention the whole process in the book.

2) Really sorry about that point. I should definitely have mentioned about currency conversions needing to settle. And you are right that a margin account avoids these issues, which is why I keep forgetting about them.

3) Are the figures not very readable, or they simply do not show? I agree that delivering both should be better. But I did not find a good way to do that with the service I am using. I will try again. You can send me a private message on the forum and I will send you the PDF as well.

I will do the necessary changes in the coming week!

This is very helfpul!
 
I have simplified the offer to sell the PDF and epub together. This is not ideal with SendOwl, but it works.

If anybody purchased one and would like the other, send me a private message and I will send you the other one.

I have also added information about cash having to settle.
If anybody has anymore feedback, I would be glad to hear it.
 
If anybody read the book entirely and found it useful, I would love if you could contact me (by private message) and give me a short testimonial so that I could include on the blog.
 
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