William J. Bernstein's "The Investor's Manifesto"

This is one of the most honest books about investing and its message is simple: the individual investor is bound to lose. The cards are stacked against him. Both institutionally and in terms of individual psychology. We are wired the wrong way to win. And the big boys of Wall Street have stacked the chips against us.

I like the message at the end of the book where he addresses the idiotic Republican plan to destroy Social Security and push the little guys out into the arena of Wall Street to compete against the big boys. I've bolded the key bit:

Over the past three decades, the powers that be have handed investors, particularly those saving for retirement, a very raw deal indeed. First and foremost, the traditional pension plan, which in the past had provided tens of millions of ordinary American workers with a secure income and a dignified retirement, has been replaced with an investment mess of pottage: poorly designed, overly expensive, and thus miserably performing defined-contribution plans that seem almost consciously designed to fail.

Worse, the average American is assumed to somehow possess the expertise and, more importantly, the emotional discipline to execute a competent lifetime investment plan, a goal that even many Wall Street professionals fall well short of. In the coming decades, retirees, and our society as a whole, will reap the whirlwind of this folly.

I came from the high tech industry which didn't even get the benefit of a "defined-contribution" plan. We were totally on our own with a simple 5% match from the employer for any retirement funds we socked away. This was pitiful because (a) the employer ended up paying less than traditional industries and (b) this left us to the tender mercies of the "investment industry" bent on plucking us of everything we had. Things went especially bad for me because the stock market blew up twice late in my working career to leave me with less dollars than I had literally put in, so I lost money over 30 years of investing. But George Bush wanted to push everybody into this kind of do-it-yourself scheme so that his buddies on Wall Street would have even more sheep to shear.

If you want to understand why do-it-yourself investing is such a hazardous undertaking, this is the book to read.

If you want to understand what are the best strategies to survive trying to invest, this is the book to read.

If you want to understand the historical role of the financial industry in picking the pockets of its so-called customer, the investment client, this is the book to read.

This is an excellent book.