The Neatest Little Guide to Mutual Fund Investing

The world of mutual funds can be bewildering, but finding one's way in it has become a little easier in the past few years, with the arrival of books such as Mutual Funds for Dummies . Yet even this Dummies guide, weighing in at 406 pages, can be a little intimidating. Someone should write a smaller book, readable in an hour or so, with just the basic information on how mutual funds work and how to identify and evaluate the appropriate ones.

Which is exactly what Jason Kelly has done. The Neatest Little Guide to Mutual Fund Investing is admirably brief at 131 pages. It could be used as a textbook example of how to render a complex subject in the simplest and clearest way possible. Yet nothing essential has been left out, and even experienced fund investors could benefit from this quick read. How many investors fully grasp, for example, the various measurements of a fund's riskiness? Kelly explains what to make of a fund's alpha, beta, and standard deviation, and he does it in a way that anyone can understand and use. --Barry Mitzman