The Wall Street Journal Complete Money and Investing Guidebook

As often happens, the marketing title does not accurately reflect the author's purpose in writing the book. As a brief introduction to Wall Street terminology, history, and trivia, this book is an absolute gem. It is not, however, a "complete guidebook" to "money & investing." The book does offer excellent layman overviews on "money & investing" topics including stocks, bonds, mutual funds, options, futures, real-estate, and retirement investing. The coverage is as "complete" as can be expected from a 200-page book. The author's emphasis is in clarifying concepts at the operational level rather than getting lost in the mathematical details. True to the spirit of a "guidebook," there are sections on "online resources" and "suggesting reading" at the end of each chapter. However, even the "suggested reading" does not go deep enough. So, when you're ready to dig deeper, you would be well advised to pick up a college text on corporate finance.

For those people out there who are absolutely new to investing this is the first book that you must read. It will help you understand exactly how the stock market works and teach you all the technical jargon that would normally confuse the hell out of you.

I could'nt figure out all those tables in the Wall Street Journal before reading this book. I'm reading it twice because each page is chalk full of info. Buy if you want to start learning how money works. Great book

I haven't finished the whole guidebook, but this book is really informative. It contains quick and short histories of the financial market (ie. NYSE, NASDAQ, bonds, stocks, etc). Newbies like myself easily get confused on how the general financial system works, but this book helped a lot in understanding them (those covered in the book). Investors who are seeking readily available information about what stocks, or anything considered as "hot" in the current market, will be disappointed, so I wasn't surprised on how some "experts" rated this book as "less than helpful."

The book walks you through all types of investment tools, explaining how they work, their terminology, and how to read the investment data and tools that the Wall Street Journal provides. A great book to work the basics of financial investment