The smartest investment book you'll ever read The simple, stress-free way to reach your investment goals

Solin (Does Your Broker Owe You Money?), an attorney specializing in securities arbitration, follows in the steps of financial luminaries such as Burton Malkiel and John Bogle in his praise of passive or, as he terms it, smart investing. He advises readers to adopt passive investing to obtain better returns, proposing investment of funds in low-cost index funds that attempt to match stock and bond market indexes by buying every security in a particular index such as the S&P 500. He argues that 95 percent of investors do not beat market averages because of excessive costs in the financial services industry and that history has proven that most professional managers cannot consistently outperform the overall market. Solin does a great job of keeping his advice simple; his guide can be read and digested in a couple of hours. Especially helpful are his inclusion of four different risk-level model portfolios based on Vanguard and Fidelity index funds and an in-depth asset allocation questionnaire to help readers determine their personal investment mix. All public libraries should consider this straightforward guide for their investment collections. Lawrence R. Maxted, Gannon Univ., Erie, PA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.