This may seem an odd post given that my book, “Choose Stocks Wisely: A Formula That Produced Amazing Returns,” is about how to lower the risk when choosing individual stocks to buy. Yet, investing in stocks is certainly not something for everyone.

Many people today are just getting by, financially, and are not at a place in life to have discretionary resources to invest in stocks. There are others who have money to invest but don’t want to own stocks or other investments that could decline in value. They simply want to avoid any investment that puts principal at risk. Yes, there are good reasons why investing money into individual stocks is not for everybody.

There is a deeper purpose to my book than to advocate investment in individual stocks. It’s to illustrate the essential role of the balance sheet to the assessment of risk before investing in stocks.

Ethan Pope wrote the foreword for my book. He is an excellent source for information on how to manage personal finances, having authored a number of very helpful books and having counseled numerous groups and individuals. Ethan is helping people to strengthen their balance sheets.

Just as it is critical to manage personal finances in a manner that provides for financial stability and independence, it is also important, when it comes to investing in stocks, that one chooses stock investments wisely based on identifying undervalued companies with healthy balance sheets.

Just as an individual’s balance sheet needs to be healthy, so does a corporation’s balance sheet. My book shows how to evaluate the health of a corporate balance sheet. I believe the coverage of the balance sheet in the book is useful to the person who plans to invest in stocks and to the one who does not. Each one of us has a balance sheet to manage.