The Pig and the Python is a fictionalized guide to investment advice that aims to emulate the folksy down-home style of The Wealthy Barber. Taking the effects of the baby-boomer bulge on consumer trends as its premise, the book follows the DeMarcos, a fictitious baby-boomer couple, as they search for answers in our troubled economic times. The DeMarcos consult their neighbour, Hazen, for advice. He, conveniently, just happens to be a financial adviser specializing in the effects of the boomer generation. But Boom, Bust and Echo this is not. With one investment tip per chapter – usually described in terms too general to be of any real use – this book reads like The Celestine Prophecy for investors. Should one really make investment decisions based on the fact that boomers are turning to gardening in a big way? There’s nothing new here, and the information is dumbed down so much that even the most novice investors are likely to find it unhelpful.

Commodities, for example, are defined in one chapter. Later on we learn that a stock is a “certificate representing ownership in a company” and that baby boomers are entering the stock market in droves. The writers also use demographics (and the principle of supply and demand) to explain the run-up in real estate values in the 1980s. As we reach the pinnacle of this ladder of knowledge, the benefits of socking away money in RRSPs are revealed.

The book is co-written by David Cork, investment adviser with ScotiaMcLeod in Ottawa, and Susan Lightstone, associate editor of This Country Magazine, and is an attempt to cash in on the recent spate of books and articles on boomer demographics. In the end, The Pig and the Python is painfully tedious and too facile by far.