Financial Fine Print (PDF)

Thirty-five million individual investors jumped into the stock
market for the first time during the late 1990s without asking
questions about the stocks they were buying. When the bubble burst
and the large number of accounting scandals began to grow, most
investors didn't know where to turn or whom to trust. Now it
has become more important than ever for investors to take matters
into their own hands.

Financial Fine Print: Uncovering a Company's True
Value lets individual investors in on the secrets that seasoned
professional investors use when they evaluate a potential
investment. Buried deep in a company's quarterly (10-Q) and
annual (10-K) reports are the real clues to a company's
financial health: the footnotes. At many large companies, these
footnotes can run for more than 30 pages and for some corporations
have doubled in the past five years, making them simply too
important for investors to ignore.

Financial Fine Print spells out exactly what investors
need to look for within the footnotes of a company's reports
in order to make better, more informed decisions. By using numerous
examples of actual footnotes that have appeared in SEC documents,
the book teaches investors in easy-to-understand language ways to
spot - and avoid - future Enrons and Worldcoms (and
Tycos and Adelphias and HealthSouths). For any investor who has
spent the past three years watching their investments shrink and
has begun to think about getting back into the market, this book
provides the critical tools that investors need to know to avoid
getting burned once again.