"Fundamentals of Investments" was written to: focus on students as investment managers, giving them information they can act on instead of concentrating on theories and research without the proper context; offer strong, consistent pedagogy, including a balanced, unified treatment of the main types of financial investments as mirrored in the investment world; and, organize topics in a way that makes them easy to apply - whether to a portfolio simulation or to real life - and support these topics with hands-on activities. The approach of this text reflects two central ideas. First, there is a consistent focus on the student as an individual investor or investments manager. Second, a consistent, unified treatment of the four basic types of financial instruments - stocks, bonds, options, and futures - focusing on their characteristics and features, their risks and returns, and the markets in which they trade.
This is a good elementary text in investments, suitable for a beginning finance/economics student. I'd say that anyone who's taken a first college course in economics could successfully use this text to become more literate in investments. That said, if you've taken more than that, you'll probably find this text much too basic. It's light on the math, and that's really a bad thing most times, since you can usually say things so much simpler in math. The book is also rather inadequate once you start to move into derivatives and MBS. It also doesn't have any coverage of the kinds of products that have been in the news so much lately.
Fundamentals of Investments w/student CD + Stock-Trak + Powerweb+Crabb's Finance and Investments Using The Wall Street Journal Author: Charles J. Corrado, Bradford D Jordan, Charles Corrado, Bradford Jordan
This book taught me a lot about investing as did the college class that I took that required this as the text. I enjoyed the historical information and the terminology the most. If you are wanting to start investing, this might be just the detailed book to give you the confidence to do so.