American-Association-of-Individual-Investors Books

This book is really great I recommend it to anyone interested in investment, a great tool.

This is a long reference guide, with more than 1,000 total pages. The American Association of Individual Investors publishes this guide every year, and it's now up to (I believe) its 24th edition. I have owned different editions in the past and my oldest one is edition number seventeen.

Most all of this guide is comprised of fund information, with charts of financial information and contact data. There is very little in the way of actual reading about funds. Only 56 pages contain actual reading material, and it's all very brief. Therefore, you shouldn't look at this book as a guide to understanding mutual funds, because there just isn't that much wisdom to be found here. This is really a reference guide, designed for individuals who already have a solid understanding of the basics of mutual funds and want a good, comprehensive guide to individual funds so that they can pick and choose some good places to invest their money.

The data in this book becomes outdated rather quickly. The quoted average returns for each year are still useful, but the contact information, minimum required investment, fees, etc., are constantly changing. Even if you have a recent edition of this book, you should still call or consult the fund's web site first, to see if anything has changed.

This guide can prove to be useful if you want to find some high- performing mutual fund companies. You can save quite a bit of cash if you manage your portfolio yourself, and this guide can help you find the winning funds to add to your investment portfolio.

Overall, this is a decent guide to fund performance, but it's not a good guide to understanding mutual funds in general. If you want a book to read, rather than a reference guide, then you should consult another source. The overviews provided in chapters 1 through 8 are too short for a novice investor to gain a solid understanding of mutual funds.

This is a good reference book for beginners and long time investors. There are so many books in the market place and it was hard to choose one to rely on. I have borrowed the 17th Edition many times from a friend and decided it was time I bought my own. Now I will probably have my friend borrowing my newer edition.