New to Investing

First I'd recommend read the Rich Dad Poor Dad book. That's the starting point, whether you're in India, Japan, USA, Antartica. The basic principles are the same. You need to understand the difference between an asset and a liability, good debt and bad debt and other such fundamentals before you can really start investing.

Can the principles be applied in any country, frankly after listenining to phenomenoal opposition from people that this can't be done in India, I started doing my own personal research and I've realised it's possible here and any where else. Frankly before I came to this staunch belief I had to read thru a number of the Rich Dad Poor Dad series of books, each book taught me much more, and I realised I didn't know so much.

The last book Robert Kiyosaki book I read was Who Took my Money, I would definitely say this is the best book in the series. This book for me atleast refferred to very recent cases of how people were losing and gaining money. If I say the earlier books opened my eyes to the world of financial literacy, then this book kept my eyes open. It teaches more effectively according to me things like getting your money off the table, leveraging investments, managing them, understanding trends and helps you in understanding that the rich ensure that each investment is a guaranteed investment and how you could possibly do the same. It teaches most importantly the difference between CashFlow vs Capital Gains, a topic very few people understand. It teaches how the rich leverage in both good and bad ways and how we as investors should be aware of the same and make sure our investments gurantee a return.

Another important lesson it teaches is that great investments don't grow on trees, if that were the case everyone would be plucking them :-) It teaches you how to identify what a great investment is, it reinforces that the investment isn't good or bad but rather the investor.