Rating: 
Summary: Options
Review: This small book covers the ground well. I was especialy pleased with the section about stock options. The text is clear and covers more material than might have been expected in a general money book. My quest for an options education lead me to another book, and I recommend this in addition to the WSJ guide: THE SHORT BOOK ON OPTIONS continues your education with a clear explanation of how to actually use options in the real world. The strategy is quite conservative so should appeal to those concerned with todays diffuclt stock market. I have already earned many times the cost of this book by following the author's suggestions.
Rating:
Summary: A good start
Review: This was a good book for me to start with. The subject is presented very lightly and easliy to digest. I realized that there was a lot of things I did not know about finance/investing and this book gave me a general explanation of them. Definitely a good starter book for total beginners.
Rating: 
Summary: Incomplete and Misleading Basic Definitions
Review: To me a guide from a brand name source like The Wall Street Journal should always elucidate and never mislead. If this book were called a dictionary of money and investing, I would give it a five star rating. For it works well as a dictionary. In fact, it is better than a dictionary because the explanations are clearer, more detailed, and better illustrated. In the sections on what money, stocks, bonds, mutual funds, and economic indicators are, the book functions as that five star dictionary. Within each section beginning with stocks, the "guide" also begins to guide you in subtle ways that can cause you harm. Let me cite a few examples. The guide seems to suggest that when the market is going up, a company's earnings are doing well, and interest rates are not rising that is a good time to buy a stock. The illustrated graph seems to show other times when it is good not to buy stocks. As such, it suggests the mentality of buying and selling stocks to catch cycles. Yet research has shown that few people can master that process, so those who try will tend to do less well than those who buy and hold. Another example is in failing to discuss the role of management fees, expenses, portfolio turnover, and diversification on which mutual fund to pick. As John Bogle shows in Common Sense on Mutual Funds, these are very important factors to consider. Yet they are not defined or cited. The book also teaches people a little about short selling, commodities, futures, and other exotic investments. The book fails to point out that these are well beyond the skill of the average investor, and that many people get hurt in these areas. Basically, this is like a book of definitions about poisonous snakes that fails to mention that the snakes are poisonous if they bite you. Other obvious omissions included no mention of tracking stocks, ADRs in the stock section (you find the definition in International markets, where to me it fits less well), the differences in discount brokers, electronic trading choices, and how to find information about stocks on the Internet (the only source cited in the SEC). The focus is overly on the U.S. with only a small section on international securities. The area of interest rate futures, where Europe dominates, is barely referred to in this book. Some of the information is just plain out of date. NAIC is cited as being the National Association of Investment Clubs. I believe it dropped that name over 10 years ago although it still goes by NAIC. The guide refers to there being 37,000 investment clubs in the U.S. I think that number was exceeded many years ago. Further, much of the information is basically about how to read economic statistics. Many people would argue technical analysis is at least as important as economic statistics, but nothing about technical analysis is included in the book. If you want to learn about investing, you need to know investing principles more than you need to know these terms (such as the various aspects of a stock certificate's printing and engraving). You will find most of the relevant terms covered in basic investing books like Louis Engel's book, How to Buy Stocks. You would be far better off reading ChangeWave Investing, Common Sense on Mutual Funds, and Rich Dad, Poor Dad's Investment Guide than this book for getting a sense of what the basic investing issues are. Overcome your misconception that anything with The Wall Street Journal's name on it is bound to be the best resource. Certainly, that isn't true in this case. My suggestion is that The Wall Street Journal revise this book and either cut it back into being an expanded dictionary, or expand it into an investing guide worthy of its name.
Rating:
Summary: No doubt intended for amateurs.
Review: Wall Street Journal has placed it's awesome "cut above the rest" personality in this book just as they do in their daily newspaper. Explainations appear to have been thoroughly done and redone, very fine tuned to include the best understandable words, and occasionally are amusing and entertaining. One more reason it is obvious this book is basically written for novices is that about 50% of any given page is swamped with colorful drawings, pictures, and visual displays, and the other 50% is textual explainations. The visuals no doubt make reading about investing fascinating, and the text was superiorly written.. The only drawbacks is that the book was published in 1993, completely leaving out the new internet world.. Furthermore, being that it is a paperbook one would think they could knock the list price down from $14.95 to maybe $9.95, as it is a thin book at less than 150 pages.
Rating: 
Summary: Buy this as a gift for your investment friends
Review: You can tell Columbia University people, but you can't tell them much. Virginia Morris and her husband Kenneth have producted a remarkable little book of compressed information about one of our favorite topics: Money. There wasn't much in this that I didn't know and therefore I suggest it for those who need some refreshing on investment basics. If you still don't know the difference between M1 and M3, if you can't off the top of your head tell what a put is versus a call, if you can't say the exact differences between a bond, note, bill, and strip, then this is the compressed modern pellet of information that you need.
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