America spends more than any other developed nation on healthcare—$2.1 trillion in 2007 alone. But 47 million Americans remain uninsured, and of those Americans who are insured, many suffer from poor health. In his ground-breaking proposal, Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel offers up a plan to comprehensively restructure the delivery and quality of our healthcare. By eliminating employer-healthcare and establishing an independent program to evaluate healthcare plans and insurance companies, he offers a no-nonsense guide to how government can institute private insurance options that will allow each of us a choice of doctor and plan.
With the rate of healthcare costs rapidly outpacing our gross domestic product, we can no longer afford to maintain our fragmented delivery of care, or entertain reforms that seek to patch, rather than cure, a fractured system. Accessible, straightforward, and revolutionary in its approach, Healthcare, Guaranteed is an inarguable guide to lasting healthcare reform.
About this product: Toddlers can drive you bonkers…so adorable and fun one minute…so stubborn and demanding the next! Yet, as unbelievable as it sounds, there is a way to turn the daily stream of “nos” and “don’ts” into “yeses” and hugs…if you know how to speak your toddler’s language. In one of the most useful advances in parenting techniques of the past twenty-five years, Dr. Karp reveals that toddlers, with their immature brains and stormy outbursts, should be thought of not as pint-size people but as pintsize…cavemen.
Having noticed that the usual techniques often failed to calm crying toddlers, Dr. Karp discovered that the key to effective communication was to speak to them in their own primitive language. When he did, suddenly he was able to soothe their outbursts almost every time! This amazing success led him to the realization that children between the ages of one and four go through four stages of “evolutionary” growth, each linked to the development of the brain, and each echoing a step in prehistoric humankind’s journey to civilization:
• The “Charming Chimp-Child” (12 to 18 months): Wobbles around on two legs, grabs everything in reach, plays a nonstop game of “monkey see monkey do.” • The “Knee-High Neanderthal” (18 to 24 months): Strong-willed, fun-loving, messy, with a vocabulary of about thirty words, the favorites being “no” and “mine.” • The “Clever Caveman” (24 to 36 months): Just beginning to learn how to share, make friends, take turns, and use the potty. • The “Versatile Villager” (36 to 48 months): Loves to tell stories, sing songs and dance, while trying hard to behave.
To speak to these children, Dr. Karp has developed two extraordinarily effective techniques: 1) The “fast food” rule—restating what your child has said to make sure you got it right; 2) The four-step rule—using gesture, repetition, simplicity, and tone to help your irate Stone-Ager be happy again.
Once you’ve mastered “toddler-ese,” you will be ready to apply behavioral techniques specific to each stage of your child’s development, such as teaching patience and calm, doing time-outs (and time-ins), praise through “gossiping,” and many other strategies. Then all the major challenges of the toddler years—including separation anxiety, sibling rivalry, toilet training, night fears, sleep problems, picky eating, biting and hitting, medicine taking — can be handled in a way that will make your toddler feel understood. The result: fewer tantrums, less yelling, and, best of all, more happy, loving time for you and your child.
About this product: If you're interested in real estate investing, you may have noticed notice the lack of coverage it gets in mainstream financial media, while stocks, bonds, and mutual funds are consistently touted as the safest and most profitable ways to invest. According to real estate guru Ken McElroy, that's because financial publications, tv and radio programs make the bulk of their money from advertising paid for by the very companies who provide such mainstream financial services. On the other hand, real estate investment is something you can do on your own--without a large amount of money up front! Picking up where left off in the bestselling The ABC's of Real Estate Investing, McElroy reveals the next essential lessons and information that no serious investor can afford to miss. Building on the foundation of real estate investment 101, McElroy tells readers:
How to think--and operate--like a real estate mogul
"The Top Ten Real Estate Markets to Watch"
How to identify and close expert deals
Why multifamily housing is the best real estate investment out there
How to surround yourself with a team that will help maximize your money
How to avoid paying thousands in taxes by structuring property sales wisely
Important projections about the future of real estate investment
About this product: Investing is all about common sense. Owning a diversified portfolio of stocks and holding it for the long term is a winner’s game. Trying to beat the stock market is theoretically a zero-sum game (for every winner, there must be a loser), but after the substantial costs of investing are deducted, it becomes a loser’s game. Common sense tells us—and history confirms—that the simplest and most efficient investment strategy is to buy and hold all of the nation’s publicly held businesses at very low cost. The classic index fund that owns this market portfolio is the only investment that guarantees you with your fair share of stock market returns.
To learn how to make index investing work for you, there’s no better mentor than legendary mutual fund industry veteran John C. Bogle. Over the course of his long career, Bogle—founder of the Vanguard Group and creator of the world’s first index mutual fund—has relied primarily on index investing to help Vanguard’s clients build substantial wealth. Now, with The Little Book of Common Sense Investing, he wants to help you do the same.
Filled with in-depth insights and practical advice, The Little Book of Common Sense Investing will show you how to incorporate this proven investment strategy into your portfolio. It will also change the very way you think about investing. Successful investing is not easy. (It requires discipline and patience.) But it is simple. For it’s all about common sense.
With The Little Book of Common Sense Investing as your guide, you’ll discover how to make investing a winner’s game:
Why business reality—dividend yields and earnings growth—is more important than market expectations
How to overcome the powerful impact of investment costs, taxes, and inflation
How the magic of compounding returns is overwhelmed by the tyranny of compounding costs
What expert investors and brilliant academics—from Warren Buffett and Benjamin Graham to Paul Samuelson and Burton Malkiel—have to say about index investing
And much more
You’ll also find warnings about investment fads and fashions, including the recent stampede into exchange traded funds and the rise of indexing gimmickry. The real formula for investment success is to own the entire market, while significantly minimizing the costs of financial intermediation. That’s what index investing is all about. And that’s what this book is all about.
JOHN C. BOGLE is founder of the Vanguard Group, Inc., and President of its Bogle Financial Markets Research Center. He created Vanguard in 1974 and served as chairman and chief executive officer until 1996 and senior chairman until 2000. In 1999, Fortune magazine named Mr. Bogle as one of the four "Investment Giants" of the twentieth century; in 2004, Time named him one of the world’s 100 most powerful and influential people, and Institutional Investor presented him with its Lifetime Achievement Award.
About this product: The bestselling author of Pioneering Portfolio Management, the definitive template for institutional fund management, returns with a book that shows individual investors how to manage their financial assets.
In Unconventional Success, investment legend David F. Swensen offers incontrovertible evidence that the for-profit mutual-fund industry consistently fails the average investor. From excessive management fees to the frequent "churning" of portfolios, the relentless pursuit of profits by mutual-fund management companies harms individual clients. Perhaps most destructive of all are the hidden schemes that limit investor choice and reduce returns, including "pay-to-play" product-placement fees, stale-price trading scams, soft-dollar kickbacks, and 12b-1 distribution charges.
Even if investors manage to emerge unscathed from an encounter with the profit-seeking mutual-fund industry, individuals face the likelihood of self-inflicted pain. The common practice of selling losers and buying winners (and doing both too often) damages portfolio returns and increases tax liabilities, delivering a one-two punch to investor aspirations.
In short: Nearly insurmountable hurdles confront ordinary investors.
Swensen's solution? A contrarian investment alternative that promotes well-diversified, equity-oriented, "market-mimicking" portfolios that reward investors who exhibit the courage to stay the course. Swensen suggests implementing his nonconformist proposal with investor-friendly, not-for-profit investment companies such as Vanguard and TIAA-CREF. By avoiding actively managed funds and employing client-oriented mutual-fund managers, investors create the preconditions for investment success.
Bottom line? Unconventional Success provides the guidance and financial know-how for improving the personal investor's financial future.
About this product: Day trading is undoubtedly the most exciting way to make money from home. It's also the riskiest. Before you begin, you need three things: patience, nerves of steel, and a well-thumbed copy of Day Trading For Dummies—the low-risk way to find out whether day trading is for you.
This plain-English guide shows you how day trading works, identifies its all-too-numerous pitfalls, and get you started with an action plan. From classic and renegade strategies to the nitty-gritty of daily trading practices, it gives you the knowledge and confidence you'll need to keep a cool head, manage risk, and make decisions instantly as you buy and sell your positions. Learn how to:
Set up your accounts and your office
Connect with research and trading services
Plan and research trades carefully and thoroughly
Comply with regulations issues and tax requirements
Leverage limited capital
Cope with the stress quick-action trading
Sell short to profit from price drops
Evaluate your day-trading performance
Use technical and fundamental analysis
Find entry and exit points
Use short-term trading to establish a long-term portfolio
You'll also find Top-Ten Lists of good reasons to go into day trading, or run from it in terror, as well as lists of the most common (and expensive) mistakes day traders make. Read Day Trading For Dummies and get the tips, guidance, and solid foundation you need to succeed in this thrilling, lucrative and rewarding career.
About this product: Here is THE book recounting the life and times of one of the most respected men in the world, Warren Buffett. The legendary Omaha investor has never written a memoir, but now he has allowed one writer, Alice Schroeder, unprecedented access to explore directly with him and with those closest to him his work, opinions, struggles, triumphs, follies, and wisdom. The result is the personally revealing and complete biography of the man known everywhere as “The Oracle of Omaha.”
Although the media track him constantly, Buffett himself has never told his full life story. His reality is private, especially by celebrity standards. Indeed, while the homespun persona that the public sees is true as far as it goes, it goes only so far. Warren Buffett is an array of paradoxes. He set out to prove that nice guys can finish first. Over the years he treated his investors as partners, acted as their steward, and championed honesty as an investor, CEO, board member, essayist, and speaker. At the same time he became the world’s richest man, all from the modest Omaha headquarters of his company Berkshire Hathaway. None of this fits the term “simple.”
When Alice Schroeder met Warren Buffett she was an insurance industry analyst and a gifted writer known for her keen perception and business acumen. Her writings on finance impressed him, and as she came to know him she realized that while much had been written on the subject of his investing style, no one had moved beyond that to explore his larger philosophy, which is bound up in a complex personality and the details of his life. Out of this came his decision to cooperate with her on the book about himself that he would never write.
Never before has Buffett spent countless hours responding to a writer’s questions, talking, giving complete access to his wife, children, friends, and business associates—opening his files, recalling his childhood. It was an act of courage, as The Snowball makes immensely clear. Being human, his own life, like most lives, has been a mix of strengths and frailties. Yet notable though his wealth may be, Buffett’s legacy will not be his ranking on the scorecard of wealth; it will be his principles and ideas that have enriched people’s lives. This book tells you why Warren Buffett is the most fascinating American success story of our time.
About this product: The Little Book that helps investors avoid big losses in an economic downturn
In the wake of falling stock and real estate prices, the American economy is poised for a decade-long bear market, so says Peter Schiff. After he accurately predicted the current market turmoil, savvy investors should pay attention--and start protecting their assets now, before the markets take their toll. The Little Book of Bull Moves in Bear Markets shows investors how to stay safe and stay liquid during economic downturns.
Using economic history as a guide, Schiff looks at the bear markets that followed the bull markets of the 1920s and 1960s to predict what the American economy will look like after it corrects for the tech and real estate bubbles of the 1990s and early 2000s. Combining financial, economic, and political perspectives, Schiff looks at what worked in those earlier bear markets and predicts what strategies are most likely to work over the next ten years. In the end, Schiff argues that the next decade will most closely resemble the 1970s, complete with inflation, rising interest rates, and soaring commodity prices. This reversal of trends will make past investment strategies obsolete and pose a challenge for investors trying to build and protect their wealth. Smart investing will always pay off; the key lies in using the best strategies for the market at hand. For investors who see the writing on the wall but don't know what to do about it, The Little Book of Bull Moves in Bear Markets offers a timely, critical answer.
About this product: The economic tipping point for the United States is no longer theoretical. It is a reality today. The country has gone from the world's largest creditor to its greatest debtor; the value of the dollar is sinking; domestic manufacturing is winding down - and these trends don't seem to be slowing. Peter Schiff casts a sharp, clear-sighted eye on these factors and explains what the possible effects may be and how investors can protect themselves. For more than a decade, Schiff has not only observed the U.S. economy, but also helped his clients reposition their portfolios to reflect his outlook. What he sees is a nation facing an economic storm brought on by growing federal, personal, and corporate debt, too-little savings, a declining dollar, and lack of domestic manufacturing. Crash-Proof is an informed and informative warning of a looming period marked by sizeable tax hikes, loss of retirement benefits, double digit inflation, even - as happened recently in Argentina - the possible collapse of the middle class. However, Schiff does have a survival plan that can provide the protection that readers will need in the coming years.
BOOK
