Over the years, market developments have proven the wisdom of Graham’s strategies. While preserving the integrity of Graham’s original text, this revised edition includes updated commentary by noted financial journalist Jason Zweig, whose perspective incorporates the realities of today’s market, draws parallels between Graham’s examples and today’s financial headlines, and gives readers a more thorough understanding of how to apply Graham’s principles.

Vital and indispensable, this HarperBusiness Essentials edition of The Intelligent Investor is the most important book you will ever read on how to reach your financial goals.

More importantly, he highlights practical steps that beginning and advanced investors alike can easily follow to improve their financial performance.

An indispensable survival guide to the hostile wilderness of today’s financial markets, The Devil’s Financial Dictionary delivers practical insights with a scorpion’s sting. It cuts through the fads and fakery of Wall Street and clears a safe path for investors between euphoria and despair.
Staying out of financial purgatory has never been this fun.

Note: Please be advised that copies offered online by what Amazon calls “third-party sellers” may be missing the final 28 pages of text.

Some booksellers have been attempting to sell such copies for at least $275 apiece, apparently in the belief that they will be worth even more someday if they become collectibles. That is a big “if.” If you pay more than the $19.95 list price, please don’t blame me if you later feel you didn’t get your money’s worth.

Preview the book

Here are a few entries that give a taste of The Devil’s Financial Dictionary, my glossary of financial terms published by PublicAffairs in November 2015.

Read the excerpt

Inspired by Ambrose Bierce’s satirical masterpiece, The Devil’s Financial Dictionary is a glossary of all the financial terms you need to know but may never have understood.

In each definition, I’ve tried to distill everything I’ve ever learned about a topic down into the fewest number of words with the greatest educational and entertainment value.

Wall Street is, in many ways, a giant obfuscation machine, operated on the principles of making simple ideas complex, safe investments risky, and important facts incomprehensible. Alan Greenspan’s words when he was chairman of the Federal Reserve Board apply to the financial industry as well: “If I seem unduly clear to you, you must have misunderstood what I said.” That’s why every investor — if not every citizen — needs a clear translation tool to cut through the jargon of money.

If you’ve ever been lost in a foreign country without a guidebook to the local language, you know that we aren’t kidding when we call this book “a survival guide.”

The goal of The Devil’s Financial Dictionary is to make you laugh and learn at the same time. I know I’ve never had more fun writing anything in my entire career; I hope you will like it.

The book covers everything from keeping your cash safe, to selecting stocks and bonds, to choosing the right financial advisor and understanding your own investing behavior.  This reliable resource goes one step further than the rest by questioning an investor’s true appetite for risk. The Little Book of Safe Money shows readers not only what to do but what not to do in order to build wealth and safeguard one’s financial future.

Page by page, this timely book:

• Outlines strategies for satisfying our ever-changing investment appetites while focusing on a long-term financial plan
• Discusses both the external and internal forces that can hurt your investment performance—and how you can better deal with them
• Offers practical guidance, tools, and tips for surviving and thriving in a down market

In a straightforward and accessible style, Zweig peels away layer after layer of buzz words, emotion, and myths to reveal what’s really going on in today’s financial markets and how we can thrive under even the most adverse conditions.

When Benjamin Graham began working on Wall Street in 1914, the center of American finance resembled a lawless frontier. The concept of regulatory laws was in its infancy, the SEC wouldn’t see the light of day for 20 years, and many firms hid assets and earnings from nosy outsiders.

And security analysts didn’t exist as we know them. They were called “diagnosticians,” and they didn’t do much analyzing. These investors prided themselves on going with the “feel” of the market, and most of them rarely looked at a financial statement.

Appalled by the lack of research and quantification, Benjamin Graham set out to change all this—and ended up creating the discipline of modern security analysis.

A collection of rare writings by and interviews with one of financial history’s most brilliant visionaries, Benjamin Graham, Building a Profession presents Graham’s evolution of ideas on security analysis spanning five decades. Articles include:

• “Should Security Analysts Have a Professional Rating? The Affirmative Case”
  Financial Analysts Journal (1945)
• “Toward a Science of Security Analysis”
  Financial Analysts Journal (1952)
• “Inflated Treasuries and Deflated Stockholders: Are Corporations Milking Their Owners?”
  Forbes (1932)
• “The Future of Financial Analysis”
  Financial Analysts Journal (1963)
• “Controlling versus Outside Stockholders”
  Virginia Law Weekly (1953)

These pages reveal the revolutionary ideas of a man who didn’t so much find his calling as he created it from scratch—and opened the door for entire generations of investors.