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Book Reviews:

Essential Investment

by Philip Ryland (Economists Books / Bloomberg Press)


Canada Residents:
Hardcover
UK Residents:
Hardcover

Stockmarkets have soared and slumped, highlighting the risks of investing in stocks and shares. Everyone wants to buy low and sell high - and get a healthy stream of income in between. But it is not easy to do so - the performance of most professional fund managers is no better, and often worse, than the indices for the markets in which they invest. But any strategy for investment requires a level of knowledge that goes beyond the basics.

Essential Investment provides just that - a clear and lively explanation of the complexities and jargon of the investment business using consise essays and useful terminology guides.

Following an introduction on the roller coaster ride the stock market has taken over the past decade and the implications it has for businesses, private investors and people's pensions, the bulk of the book is an expansive A-Z with several hundred entries that explain with the essentials of the investment worldas well as some of its more arcane aspects.

Entries include: Advance-decline line, Arbitrage, Bear squeeze, Black-Scholes option pricing model, Capital asset pricing model, Chartist, Covariance, Dead cat bounce, Dow theory, Efficient frontier, Fibonacci numbers, Floating rate note, Futures, Gann theory, Golden cross, Grey market, Hedge ratio, Indifference curve, Internal rate of return, Japanese candlesticks, Kondratief cycle, LIFFE, Mark to market, Odd-lot theory, On-the-run bond, Price-to-book ratio, Qualitative analysis, Rule of twenty, Security analysis, Straddle, Tobin's Q, Trading collar, Unsystematic risk, Vanilla, Volatility, Warrant, Yield gap, Zero coupon bond.

Also included as appendices are a raft of facts and figures about stock market performance over the years and investment formulas.

Author Philip Ryland has been working and writing on the subject for over 20 years. He is an associate editor of Investors Chronicle. Previously he has worked as an investment analyst and head of research for leading stockbrokers.

-Lucas Everidge

Edition: Paperback, 240 pages