In late April, I ordered three books from Amazon:

• The Random Walk Guide to Investing by Burton G. Malkiel
• The Little Book of Common Sense Investing by John C. Bogle
• Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert T. Kiyosaki

One of my goals is to write up my personal impressions of these books, as I read them as well as once I’ve finished and let the information sink in a bit.

While waiting for my books to arrive, I made a trip out to Barnes & Noble with two purposes: First, I wanted to buy a Moleskin notebook to keep all my notes in. I found myself continually returning to the same bookmarked pages, as I simply couldn’t remember the massive amount of information I was trying to learn about finances. I had been looking for an excuse to buy a Moleskin for a few months, and thought this to be the perfect reason to buy one.

Secondly, I had just gotten a copy of my wife’s IRA investments, and found that she was invested in four different load based mutual funds. I immediately told her to transfer those as soon as she could, but couldn’t really back up my statement. So I went searching for a book I had read a few times over by Suze Orman called The Money Book for the Young, Fabulous, and Broke, which I knew had a few pages on load versus no-load mutual funds. It’s something I plan on going into soon in one of my posts.

Anyway, while looking through the investing section I happened upon Jim Cramer’s books. I wasn’t really interested in his actual investing advice yet, as I knew he focused mostly on fairly regular buying and selling of stocks, but I did see he had a biography of sorts called Confessions of a Street Addict. I spent a few minutes reading this at the store and decided to pick it up, as I figured while learning about the market would be good, increasing my desire to learn would get me even better returns.

I’m more than halfway through the book so far, and have really enjoyed it. For one, my respect of Jim Cramer has greatly increased – it’s pretty amazing to see what he has accomplished, and how he got there. The book has also served as a great history of the past few decades of the stock market, an in-depth look into how hedge funds work, and an interesting touch on what it was like to be involved with the dot-com bang and bust of the 90’s.