Books about Diversification from Amazon.com

Sound, sensible advice from a hero to frustrated investors everywhere

William Bernstein's The Four Pillars of Investing gives investors the tools they need to construct top-returning portfolios­­--without the help of a financial adviser. In a relaxed, nonthreatening style, Dr. Bernstein provides a distinctive blend of market history, investing theory, and behavioral finance, one designed to help every investor become more self-sufficient and make better-informed investment decisions. The 4 Pillars of Investing explains how any investor can build a solid foundation for investing by focusing on four essential lessons, each building upon the other. Containing all of the tools needed to achieve investing success, without the help of a financial advisor, it presents:

• Practical investing advice based on fascinating history lessons from the market
• Exercises to determine risk tolerance as an investor
• An easy-to-understand explanation of risk and reward in the capital markets

.
Price: $16.50 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Future economic growth lies in the value of experiences and transformations--good and services are no longer enough. We are on the threshold, say authors Pine and Gilmore, of the Experience Economy, a new economic era in which all businesses must orchestrate memorable events for their customers. The Experience Economy offers a creative, highly original, and yet eminently practical strategy for companies to script and stage the experiences that will transform the value of what they produce. From America Online to Walt Disney, the authors draw from a rich and varied mix of examples that showcase businesses in the midst of creating personal experiences for both consumers and businesses. The authors urge managers to look beyond traditional pricing factors like time and cost, and consider charging for the value of the transformation that an experience offers. Goods and services, say Pine and Gilmore, are no longer enough. Experiences and transformations are the basis for future economic growth, and The Experience Economy is the script from which managers can begin to direct their own transformations..
Price: $6.35 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Before I became “Phil Town, teacher of investing principles to more than 500,000 people a year,” I was a lot like you: someone who viewed individual stock investing as way too hard to do successfully As a guy who barely made a living as a river guide, I considered the whole process pretty impenetrable, and I was convinced that to do it right you had to make it a full-time job. Me, I was more interested in having full-time fun.

So I was tempted to do what you’re probably doing right now: letting some mutual fund manager worry about growing your nest egg. Let me tell you why that decision could one day make you absolutely miserable.

The fact is, because of natural market cycles, the mutual fund industry is likely to soon be facing twenty years of flat returns. That means that if you’ve got your nest egg tucked away in funds—especially the type found in most 401ks—your egg won’t get much bigger than it is now. Translation: Get ready for a retirement filled with lots of cold cuts, plenty of quality TV-watching time, and a place to live that’s too small to accommodate your visiting kids.

In this book I’ll show you how I turned $1,000 into $1 million in only five years, and then proceeded to make many millions more. I came to investing as a person who wasn’t great at math, possessed zero extra cash, and wanted a life—not an extra three hours of work to do every day.

Fortunately, I was introduced to The Rule.

Rule #1, as famed investor Warren Buffett will tell you, is don’t lose money. Through an intriguing process that I’ll clarify in this book, not losing money results in making more money than you ever imagined. What it comes down to is buying shares of companies only when the numbers—and the intangibles—are on your side. If that sounds too good to be true, it’s because the mind-set I’ll be introducing you to leads not to bets but to certainties. Believe me, if there were anything genius-level about this, I’d still be a river guide collecting unemployment much of the year.

Part of the secret is thinking of yourself as a business owner rather than a stock investor. Part is taking advantage of today’s new Internet tools, which drastically reduce the “homework factor.” (We’re talking a few minutes, tops.) Part is knowing the only five numbers that really count in valuing a potential investment. And part—maybe the most important part—is using the risk-free Rule #1 approach to consistently pay a mere 50 cents to buy a dollar’s worth of a business.

What I won’t waste your time with is fluff: a lot of vague parables reminding you of what you already know and leaving you exactly where you started. This is the real deal, folks: a start-to-finish, one-baby-step-at-a-time approach that will allow you to retire ten years sooner than you planned, with more creature comforts than you ever imagined.






Also available as a Random House AudioBook and eBook..
Price: $6.15 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Income Investing Today

Income Investing Today details a safe alternative to the downside risks inherent in the stock market--income securities that can provide a 7% to 8% annual cash income. With this book, fixed income expert Richard Lehmann outlines income investing concepts you need to understand, various investment vehicles, and investment strategies that will help you build a safe, diversified portfolio of investments.

The investment vehicles he explains range well beyond traditional fixed income securities or creditor instruments such as bonds, to include hybrids, REITs, mutual funds, and more. He shows that the key to building a steady, growth-oriented income portfolio is to diversify over a variety of securities that depend on different drivers--that is, portfolios that are not vulnerable to any one specific economic factor such as interest rates.

The ideal guide for individual investors saving for retirement and seeking more safety in their portfolios, Income Investing Today shows how a diversified collection of income securities can equal or exceed the returns from common stock with much lower risk..
Price: $15.60 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Among the major events in evolutionary history, few rival in importance the appearance of animals The Rise of Animals -- a significant reference providing a comprehensive synthesis of the early radiation of the animal kingdom -- fully captures this moment in geologic time.

Five of the world's leading paleontologists take us on a journey to the most important fossil sites that serve as unique windows to the earliest animal life -- including the Ediacara Hills of Australia, the Russian taiga and tundra, the deserts of southwest Africa, and the rugged coasts of Newfoundland. Each of these places holds a rich fossil record that reveals how the animal form came into existence and why some groups succeeded while others failed. The authors describe the diversification of the Kingdom Animalia into the familiar body plans of today: from simple animals such as sponges to complex groups like mollusks, arthropods, echinoderms, and chordates that appear explosively in the Cambrian.

This exquisitely illustrated book reveals the early moments of an evolutionary process that eventually resulted in our own species. An essential resource for paleontologists, biologists, geologists, and teachers, The Rise of Animals is the best single reference on one of earth's most significant events.

.
Price: $56.01 [Notify me when price goes down.]

The Harvard Business Review paperback series is designed to bring today's managers and professionals the fundamental information they need to stay competitive in a fast-moving world. Here are the landmark ideas that have established the Harvard Business Review as required reading for ambitious businesspeople in organizations around the globe. The Harvard Business Review on Strategies for Growth presents the latest tactics--including acquisitions, diversification, and innovation--for helping managers find and exploit the best opportunities for growth and profitability. .
Price: $2.38 [Notify me when price goes down.]

With about $450 billion in assets, funds of hedge funds are the most recent darling of investors While hedge funds carry high risk for the promise of high returns they are designed for the very rich and for large institutional investors such as pension funds. A Fund of Hedge Funds (FOF) spreads investments among a number of hedge funds to reduce risk and provide diversification, while maintaining the potential for higher than average returns. Odds are that some pension fund of yours is invested heavily in these products, and more recently these FOFs have been opened to more and more individual investors in offshore jurisdictions with lower minimum entry levels. Since this is a new and extremely fast-moving financial phenomenon, academic research has just begun in earnest, and this is the first book to present rigorous academic research by some of the leading lights in academic finance, carefully analyzing the broad array of issues involved in FOFs.

* With over $450 billion in assets, hedge funds of funds are the darling of investors
* First book to present rigorous academic research about funds of funds
* Leading lights in academic finance from around the world analyze the broad array of issues involved in funds of funds.
Price: $78.32 [Notify me when price goes down.]

This is a classic book, representing the first major breakthrough in the field of modern financial theory. In effect, it created the mathematics of portfolio selection in a model which has turned out to be the indispensable building block from which the theory of the demand for risky securities is constructed..
Price: $66.79 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Which would you rather do — go to a supermarket and buy a tasteless fish, or go diving and catch your own fresh fish? Written for the novice who wants to get started in underwater hunting, this book contains basic information on choosing the right gear and deciding where to hunt. Also includes information on secret techniques, fish species, accessories, and conservation..
Price: $17.13 [Notify me when price goes down.]

After a long and beguiling climb, the stock market dive of 2000-2002 put phrases like “irrational exuberance” and “speculative bubble” back into common usage and was a stinging reminder of the importance of portfolio diversification. Financial wizard Mahesh Kumar shows how to guard against the inherent riskiness of the stock market while still reaping the benefits of a profitable portfolio in his new book Wine Investment for Portfolio Diversification: How Collecting Fine Wines Can Yield Greater Returns than Stocks and Bonds. It’s a thorough piece of academic analysis, which combines the Nobel Prize winning Markowits Theory and Kumar’s Fine Wine Fifty Index and empirically proves that Fine Wine is one of the best diversification tools available (whether you’re high-finance or a modest personal investor). Fine Wine is “uncorrelated” with stocks and bonds; that is, they aren’t affected by the same types of risk. Moreover, Kumar points out that Fine Wine has a HIGHER expected return relative to its overall contribution of risk. “Smart investors are those who recognize large shifts in the economy early on and invest for the long term,” he writes. “In the ‘70s, gold investors thrived; in the ‘80s it was the real estate owner’s turn. In the ‘90s the action shifted to stocks. What will this decade bring? Alternative investments (Fine Wine, Fine Art or Antiques) will make a breakthrough, and compensate investors for their disappointing equity, bond and cash portfolio returns.” The book also includes a history of wine markets dating back to the 12th century; chapters on the different modes of marketing and distribution in Bordeaux, and the primary and secondary markets; and he critically analyses the total alternative investment market, and the relationships between their price and quality. He also discusses, systematically, the key question: what constitutes a good investment portfolio?.
Price: $28.54 [Notify me when price goes down.]