($19.95, Wiley)
Most people charged with managing their own retirement portfolios don’t want to read about the minutiae of investing, said David McPherson in ABCnews.com. They just want to understand the bottom line. This streamlined guide, modeled after William Strunk Jr.’s legendary writing guide, The Elements of Style, outlines investing basics in a “simple but meaningful” manner. Even wealthy investors could benefit from the book’s advice, says Paul Sullivan in The New York Times. Malkiel, best known for his “classic investment treatise” A Random Walk Down Wall Street, recommends that investors of all incomes eschew the “latest, greatest investment” and concentrate instead on building a diversified portfolio—usually with low-cost index funds. Over the past three decades, Malkiel points out, there are vanishingly few mutual funds that have ultimately beaten the stock market. “You can count them on the fingers of one hand.”
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