The Wall Street Journal Guide to Understanding Money & Investing

The Wall Street Journal Guide to Understanding Money & Investing initiates you into the mysteries of the financial pages — buying stocks, bonds, mutual funds, futures and options, spotting trends and evaluating companies. For those who are curious but intimidated by everyday financial jargon, this guide offers a literate, forthright and lively alternative.

• Money
• The History of Money
• Paper Money
• The U.S. Dollar
• The Money Cycle
• Other Forms of Money
• The Federal Reserve System
• Controlling the Money Flow
• The Money Supply
• Measuring Economic Health
• Consumer Confidence
• The Consumer Price Index
• The Economic Cycle
• The World of Money
• Trading Money
• Money Away from Home
• Stocks
• Stocks: Sharing a Corporation
• The Right to Vote
• The Value of Stock
• The Stock Certificate
• Selling New Stock
• Stock Buyers
• Buying Stock
• Selling Short
• Buying on Margin
• Stock Quotations
• Reading the Stock Tables
• Sifting Stock Information
• Evaluating Companies
• The Traditional Stock Market
• Trading on the New York Stock Exchange
• The Electronic Stock Market
• Reading the Averages
• Market Indexes
• Market Cycles
• Crash!
• Traders Around the Clock
• Tracking International Markets
• The World Stock Index
• International Investing
• Bonds
• Bonds Financing the Future
• The Bond Certificate
• Figuring A Bond's Worth
• Rating Bonds
• Tracking Bond Performance
• Municipal Bonds
• U.S. Treasury Bonds, Notes and Bills
• A Bond Vocabulary
• Buying and Trading Bonds
• Other Bonds, Other Choices
• The World of Bonds
• Mutual Funds
• Mutual Funds: Putting It Together
• The Mutual Funds Market
• Targeted Investments
• Special Purpose Funds
• Inside a Mutual Fund
• Mutual Fund Quotations
• It's All in the Charts
• Tracking Fund Performance
• The Prospectus
• International Funds
• Futures & Options
• Futures and Options
• Commodities
• The Futures Exchanges
• Trading Futures Contracts
• Hedgers and Speculators
• How Futures Work
• Reading Futures Tables
• Financial Futures
• A World of Options
• Reading Options Tables
• Using Options
• Other Options
• Tracking Other Options

If you don't understand money and the stock exchange after this, you're a hopeless case.