Before I became “Phil Town, teacher of investing principles tomore than 500,000 people a year,” I was a lot like you: someone whoviewed individual stock investing as way too hard to dosuccessfully. As a guy who barely made a living as a river guide, Iconsidered the whole process pretty impenetrable, and I wasconvinced that to do it right you had to make it a full-time job.Me, I was more interested in having full-time fun. So I was tempted to do what you’re probably doing right now:letting some mutual fund manager worry about growing your nest egg.Let me tell you why that decision could one day make you absolutelymiserable.

Private equity firms are snapping up brand-name companies andassembling portfolios that make them immense global conglomerates.They're often able to maximize investor value far more successfullythan traditional public companies. How do PE firms become suchpowerhouses? Learn how, in Lessons from Private Equity Any CompanyCan Use. Bain chairman Orit Gadiesh and partner Hugh MacArthur usethe concise, actionable format of a memo to lay out the fivedisciplines that PE firms use to attain their edge This is yourplaybook for building the results-driven culture that will put yourfirm on par with PE. From our new Memo to the CEO series--solutions-focused advice from today's leading practitioners

For more than thirty years, The Only InvestmentGuide You’ll Ever Need has been a favorite finance guide,earning the allegiance of more than a million readers across theUnited States. Now even more indispensable, this completely revisedand updated edition will show readers how to use money to theirbest advantage in the wake of epochal change on Wall Street, nomatter how much or how little they may have.

From America's liveliest writer on mathematics, a witty andinsightful book on the stock market and the irrepressibility of ourdreams of wealth. In A Mathematician Plays the Stock Marketbest-selling author John Allen Paulos demonstrates what the toolsof mathematics can tell us about the vagaries of the stock market.Employing his trademark stories, vignettes, paradoxes, and puzzles(and even a film treatment), Paulos addresses every thinkingreader's curiosity about the market: Is it efficient? Is itrational? Is there anything to technical analysis, fundamentalanalysis, and other supposedly time-tested methods of pickingstocks? How can one quantify risk? What are the most common scams?What light do fractals, network theory, and common psychologicalfoibles shed on investor behavior? Are there any approaches toinvesting that truly outperform the major indexes? Can a deeperknowledge of mathematics help beat the odds? All of these questionsare explored with the engaging erudition that made Paulos's AMathematic

Although Africa has long been known to be rich in oil,extracting it hadnt seemed worth the effort and risk untilrecently. But with the price of Middle Eastern crude oilskyrocketing and advancing technology making reserves easier totap, the region has become the scene of a competition between majorpowers that recalls the nineteenth-century scramble forcolonization there. But what does this giddy new oil boom meanforAmerica, for the world, for Africans themselves? John Ghazviniantraveled through twelve African countriesfrom Sudan to Congo toAngolatalking to warlords, industry executives, bandits, activists,priests, missionaries, oil-rig workers, scientists, and ordinarypeople whose lives have been transformednot necessarily for thebetterby the riches beneath their feet. The result is a high-octanenarrative that reveals the challenges, obstacles, reasons fordespair, and reasons for hope emerging from the worlds newestenergy hot spot.

From Rin Tin Tin to Casablanca to HarryPotter , the Warner Bros. story is the history of Hollywood.Eighty-five years of screen icons, legendary films, andhistory-making achievements are detailed in this comprehensive,photo-filled treasure trove, fully authorized by the studio. No production company has had more legendary films, stars, orinfluence on the course of Hollywood than Warner Bros. Among thesuperstars who worked for the studio are Bette Davis, HumphreyBogart, Lauren Bacall, Joan Crawford, Marlon Brando, James Dean,and John Wayne. Filmmakers like Martin Scorsese and Stanley Kubrickmade history for the studio, and it has been home to blockbusterfranchises like Superman , Batman , LethalWeapon , and Harry Potter . Produced in conjunction with Warner Bros., this volume is theultimate guide to the greatest movie studio in history. You MustRemember This: The Warner Bros. Story is also the companion toa five part documentary in the PBS American Masters series byauthor Richard Schickel that will

In The Futures , Emily Lambert, senior writer at Forbes magazine, tells us the rich and dramatic history ofthe Chicago Mercantile Exchange and Chicago Board of Trade, whichtogether comprised the original, most bustling futures market inthe world. She details the emergence of the futures business as akind of meeting place for gamblers and farmers and its subsequenttransformation into a sophisticated electronic market wherecontracts are traded at lightning-fast speeds. Lambert also detailsthe disastrous effects of Wall Street's adoption of the futurescontract without the rules and close-knit social bonds that hadmade trading it in Chicago work so well. Ultimately Lambert arguesthat the futures markets are the real "free" markets and thatspeculators, far from being mere parasites, can serve a vitaleconomic and social function given the right architecture. Thetraditional futures market, she explains, because of its writtenand cultural limits, can serve as a useful example for how marketsought to work and becom

The international bestseller on the extent to which personalfreedom has been eroded by government regulations and agencieswhile personal prosperity has been undermined by governmentspending and economic controls. New Foreword by the Authors;Index.

THE ESSENTIAL GALBRAITH includes key selections from the mostimportant works of John Kenneth Galbraith, one of the mostdistinguished writers of our time - from THE AFFLUENT SOCIETY, thegroundbreaking book in which he conined the tern "conventionalwisdom," to THE GREAT CRASH, an unsurpassed account of the eventsthat triggered America's worst economic crisis. Galbraith's newintroductions place the works in their historical moment and makeclear their enduring relevance for the new century. THE ESSENTIALGALBRAITH will delight old admirers and introduce one of our mostbeloved writers to a new generation of readers. It is also anindispensable resource for scholars and students of economics,history, and politics, offering unparalleled access to the seminalwritings of an extraordinary thinker.

By day he made thousands of dollars a minute. By night hespent it as fast as he could, on drugs, sex, and internationalglobe-trotting. From the binge that sank a 170-foot motor yacht,crashed a Gulfstream jet, and ran up a $700,000 hotel tab, to thewife and kids who waited for him at home, and the fast-talking,hard-partying young stockbrokers who called him king and did hisbidding, here, in his own inimitable words, is the story of theill-fated genius they called… In the 1990s Jordan Belfort, former kingpin of the notoriousinvestment firm Stratton Oakmont, became one of the most infamousnames in American finance: a brilliant, conniving stock-chopper wholed his merry mob on a wild ride out of the canyons of Wall Streetand into a massive office on Long Island. Now, in this astoundingand hilarious tell-all autobiography, Belfort narrates a story ofgreed, power, and excess no one could invent. Reputedly the prototype for the film Boiler Room, StrattonOakmont turned microcap investing into a wi

Updated for paperback publication, Aftershock is a brilliantreading of the causes of our current economic crisis, with a planfor dealing with its challenging aftermath. When the nation’s economy foundered in 2008, blame was directedalmost universally at Wall Street bankers. But Robert B. Reich, oneof our most experienced and trusted voices on public policy,suggests another reason for the meltdown. Our real problem, heargues, lies in the increasing concentration of wealth in the handsof the richest Americans, while stagnant wages and rising costshave forced the middle class to go deep into debt. Reich’sthoughtful and detailed account of where we are headed over thenext decades—and how we can fix our economic system—is a practical,humane, and much-needed blueprint for restoring America’s economyand rebuilding our society.

John Kenneth Galbraith has long been at the center of Americaneconomics, in key positions of responsibility during the New Deal,World War II, and since, guiding policy and debate. His trenchantnew book distills this lifetime of experience in the public andprivate sectors; it is a scathing critique of matters as they standtoday. Sounding the alarm about the increasing gap between realityand "conventional wisdom" -- a phrase he coined -- Galbraith tells,along with much else, how we have reached a point where the privatesector has unprecedented control over the public sector. We havegiven ourselves over to self-serving belief and "contrivednonsense" or, more simply, fraud. This has come at the expense ofthe economy, effective government, and the business world.Particularly noted is the central power of the corporation and theshift in authority from shareholders and board members tomanagement. In an intense exercise of fraud, the pretense ofshareholder power is still maintained, even with the immediatepart