The Little Book of Safe Money

Zweig, a financial journalist and later the editor of the revised Intelligent Investor, wrote this in the aftermath of 2008 to argue that most products sold as safe are not. His method is to take each supposedly conservative choice and examine how it actually behaved when stressed.

He covers money market funds that broke the buck, auction rate securities that stopped auctioning, ultra-short bond funds that held mortgage paper, structured notes with principal protection that depended on the issuer's solvency, commodity exchange-traded funds whose returns diverged from spot prices because of futures roll costs, and hedge fund replication products. He also examines annuities, arguing that a plain immediate annuity is useful for guaranteeing lifetime income while variable annuities with riders are usually not worth their fees.

The positive recommendations are conventional and defensible: hold genuine cash in insured deposits or Treasury funds, use Treasury inflation-protected securities for inflation risk, keep costs low, size positions so that a total loss in any one is survivable, and separate the money you cannot afford to lose from the money you can.

The book is a product of its moment and some specifics have aged. Interest rates, annuity pricing and the exchange-traded fund market have all changed substantially since 2009. The general method, which is to ask what a product holds and who bears the loss when it fails, has not.

Columnist, 'The Intelligent Investor', The Wall Street Journal; previously Money, Time and Forbes

Your Money and Your Brain brought neuroeconomics to a general investing audience, and his annotated edition of Benjamin Graham keeps a canonical text usable for modern readers.

The Wall Street Journal, Money, Time, Forbes