Funny Money

Jacket text for Funny Money

Retired civil servant Bernard Jones isn't, as he would be the first to agree, the world's greatest investor. The man who lost money with shares in Jarvis and Railtrack, and who retains a with-profits policy with Equitable Life has proved that the best way to make a small fortune in shares is to start with a large one.

Now, though, goaded by his overbearing wife Eunice and shamed by the investing success of dinner-party bore Peter Edgington, Bernard has decided to turn over a new leaf and apply himself.

Better still, he discovers that his senile mother Dot, is actually sitting on a fortune bigger than he could have dreamed of. But getting his hands on it is easier said than done.

Funny Money includes all the 2006 columns of Bernard Jones that appeared in Investors Chronicle magazine plus much new and previously unpublished material.

About Nick Louth

Freelance journalist Nick Louth has a monthly column in the Financial Times, writes the weekly Bernard Jones Investment Diary in the Investors Chronicle, and has two columns a week on the MSN website. During 12 years working for Reuters, Nick Louth worked in New York, Amsterdam, London and Hong Kong. His articles have appeared in many of the world's major newspapers, from USA Today to the Wall Street Journal. He has interviewed some of the world's most powerful executives, from Microsoft's Bill Gates to Jack Welch of General Electric, and he has appeared on Reuters Television, BBC Radio 4 and BBC World Service. Nick's first book, 'Funny Money: The Investment Diary of Bernard Jones', was published in February 2007.

More about Nick Louth

Reviews for Funny Money

"The funniest and most realistic book ever written about investment. Bernard Jones had me laughing out loud from the first moment his diary appeared on our pages. Thank goodness his diaries are now published in this volume - a week is too long to wait for the next instalment."
- Matthew Vincent, Editor, Investors Chronicle

More funny than money. Bernard is a cross between Basil Fawlty and Victor Meldrew. His life is made miserable by the ineptitudes of petty bureaucrats, quarrelsome neighbours, unreliable builders and his own inadaquacies in bed and on the money market.

Hen-pecked by his good intentioned wife and relationship obsessed daughter, Bernard's only solace is to be found in his Hornby railway track set up in the imaginary republic of Lemon Curdistan. Here he engages in a continual guerrilla warfare, attempting to smuggle sugary snacks into his secret drawer.
For Bernard, life seems hardly worth living until two unrelated events bring a ray of hope to his bleak existence.

Firstly, Bernard discovers that his dotty mother is sitting on a fortune in shares. And then the beautiful Astrid moves in next door....
Keith Palmer

This is one of the funniest books I have read for a long time. Bernard is exactly what you would expect of a Telegraph reader & investor; and I am smiling, whilst writing, at the thought of Eunice, one of the most sympathetically drawn characters I have come across for a long time. Although intended to be humorous and taken from the column in the Investors Chronicle the characters are very real, and Bernard eventually shows his true humanity!! I hope the more secondary characters like the gay son-in-law & the demonic grandson get fuller coverage in the announced sequel "Bernard Jones & the Temple of Mammon"
John Stanbridge