The Elements of Investing: Easy Lessons for Every Investor, Updated Edition

INTRODUCTION

In 104 years of study and experience,^* here are the Elements of Investing we wish we'd always known. Experience may well be the best teacher, but the tuition is very high. Our objective is to provide individual investors—including our delightful grandchildren—the basic principles for a lifetime of financial success in saving and investing, all in 208 pages of straight talk that can be read in just two hours. There are many good books about investing. (Indeed, we've even written a few ourselves.) But most investing books run to 400 pages or more and go into complex details that tend to overwhelm normal people.

If you're like most people, you have neither the patience nor the interest to plow through that much detail. You want to get the main things right. Still, having unbiased information about financial decision making and avoiding costly investing errors is critically important.

That's why we present the most important lessons in this easy-to-read, jargon-free little book. If you happen to be familiar with William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White's classic book The Elements of Style, you will recognize one of the original sources of inspiration for this book—and why we are so brief. If you are unfamiliar with Strunk and White, don't worry. All you need to know is that they whittled down the art of powerful writing to a few basic rules of usage and composition. In less than 92 pages, they shared everything about writing that truly mattered; brevity and precision became ...