A Random Walk Down Wall Street: Including a Life-Cycle Guide to Personal Investing

An unconventional guide to investing in Wall Street tells how to put together a broad portfolio of stocks through sidestepping the experts and how to rate the potential of a stock, bond, money market fund, or other investment.

Princeton University economist Malkiel has written the sixth edition of his classic (LJ 9/15/73). The term "random walk" refers to the impossibility of predicting tomorrow's stock prices today. Technicians with all their charts cannot do so, nor can fundamentalists with all their ratios. The random walk is essentially the same as the "efficient market" theory-all new information is immediately reflected in stock prices, so the average investor can't beat the market. What's left? Buy no-load index funds (unavailable in 1973) or good stocks and hold for the long term. Before reaching this conclusion, Malkiel walks the reader through other useless theories with gentle humor and an abundance of tables and charts. The last part of the book is an extremely useful "practical guide" covering various aspects of an investor's financial life such as insurance and home ownership. Recommended for public libraries.
--Alex Wenner, Indiana Univ. Libs., Bloomington
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.