Alpha Teach Yourself Investing in 24 Hours

by Kenneth E. Little and Ken Little

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• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0028638980
• ISBN13: 9780028638980
• Release Date: May 2000
• Publisher: Penguin Putnam
• Length: 304 Pages
• Weight: 1.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 7.3" x 9.0"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Grade 12 and higher

Customer Reviews

Hands-on, practical guide for a middle-aged amateur investor

This book is a broad introduction to the concept of investing. It is broken into five major sections: 1. Getting Started, which talks about goals, credit card debt, budgets, and basic investment vehicles 2. Doing the Research, which discusses retirement plans and ways to find information you need to invest 3. Mutual Funds, Stocks, and Bonds, which finally dives into the details on those investment vehicles 4. Making Choices, which introduces various investment strategies 5. Working Toward a Goal, which wraps things up with portfolio examples, the level of participation in your investments, and retirement First off, I want to note the author's tone and his style of writing - Little presents information in a very easy-to-understand manner, with simple examples and witty jokes. The book does not feel tedious, and you can fly through it quickly. Each of the five sections consists of multiple chapters, which Little calls "Hours." The idea is that you can, of course, learn about investing in 24 hours - so there are 24 chapters. At the end of each chapter is a hands-on workshop and a quiz. While the quizzes are basically a joke (the answer choices are beyond obvious), the workshops are a great practical way to get your hands dirty and start looking at the wealth of information available to investors. Little provides multiple websites (although some are, of course, outdated) and other ways to get the information you need. I suggest you follow through some of the book's workshops - i.e. look over some annual reports, think of investment goals, etc. A big plus for this book is that it provides very practical information. It describes (although very briefly) the financial documents that a company publishes (balance sheet, income statement, cash flow) and some ways that companies can be evaluated using some basic ratios - EPS, P/E, PEG, P/S, etc. Unfortunately Little does not spend a lot of time on how to use these values to help determine the financial strength of a company. He just instructs the reader to compare the values to those of other companies in the same sector/industry. In Hour 6, the diagrams used to demonstrate how to read stock/fund price changes are unfortunately botched in a major way. The columns are not wide enough, and values are truncated or carried over to the next line. This is very confusing. In addition, some of the columns referenced in the text don't seem to exist at all in the diagrams. This is a huge miss by the editors - very disappointing. While Little attempts to target a very broad audience by demonstrating investment strategies, goal planning, and risk management for various age groups, the overall feel of this book is that of one written for a very specific group of people: individuals who are suddenly realizing that retirement is not so far off - and that it's time to start planning for it. Little constantly reinforces the notion of tax-protected accounts (i.e. the 401k and the IRA family) - yes, we get it, it's n

#1 On Investing

One of the best books. The best book I ever read on Investing. You will LOVE this book. You will learn a LOT! I HIGHLY RECOMMEND IT.