investing

Standard and Poor's Guide to Money and Investing (Standard & Poor)
$15.95
Excellent book to learn financial investment guidelines. Anyone should understand the basics shown here. Highly recommended.

Stock Investing For Dummies
$21.99
If you have no clue at all about stocks/investing, this might well be a good starting place. It is a very easy to read book, well written and informative, but it does start right at the basics and only takes you a little way up the ladder of knowledge.

The Bogleheads' Guide to Investing
$18.95
I have read every book on personal finance I have been able to find over the past thirty years. I have also listened to just about every radio talk show "financial expert". In the past several years I have become a financial follower of John Bogle. I believe he is the best! His advice is sound, practical and built on wisdom. He is a credit to the industry and this book relates his extremely valuable insight into investing.

The Four Pillars of Investing: Lessons for Building a Winning Portfolio
$29.95
While I do not follow or believe in the investment philosophy presented in this book, I still found this book educational. I appreciated how the author described the business of investing. In this section, he wrote about brokers, mutual funds, and the press. While these three perform different functions, he said:

"...their operations and strategies are somewhat different, but their ultimate goal is the same: to transfer as much of your wealth to their ledger books as they can."

I cannot overemphasize the importance for investors to understand the business of investing. Investing and the business of investing are two different things.

I also liked the section of when the author explained how Vanguard revolutionized the mutual fund industry.
"Vanguard became the first, and only, truly `mutual' fund company-that is, owned by its shareholders. There was, therefore, no incentive to mild the investors, as generally happened in the rest of the investment industry, because the funds' shareholders were also Vanguard's owners. The only imperative of this system was to keep costs down."

- Mariusz Skonieczny, author of Why Are We So Clueless about the Stock Market? Learn how to invest your money, how to pick stocks, and how to make money in the stock market