The devil's financial dictionary / Jason Zweig.

"Your Survival Guide to the Hades of Wall Street The Devil's Financial Dictionary skewers the plutocrats and bureaucrats who gave us exploding mortgages, freakish risks, and banks too big to fail. And it distills the complexities, absurdities, and pomposities of Wall Street into plain truths and aphorisms anyone can understand. An indispensable survival guide to the hostile wilderness of today's financial markets, The Devil's Financial Dictionary delivers practical insights with a scorpion's sting. It cuts through the fads and fakery of Wall Street and clears a safe path for investors between euphoria and despair. Staying out of financial purgatory has never been this fun"-- Provided by publisher.

"The Devil's Financial Dictionary is a witty and enlightening guide to the facts, fads, follies and fiction of business and investing. (See PRICELESS.) Definitions include: DAY-TRADER, n. See IDIOT. FEE, n. A tiny word with a teeny sound, which nevertheless is the single biggest determinant of success or failure for most investors. Those who keep fees as low as possible will, on average, earn the highest possible returns. REGULATOR, n. A bureaucrat who attempts to stop rampaging elephants by brandishing feather-dusters at them. Also, a future employee of a bank, hedge fund, brokerage, investment-management firm, or financial lobby. (See REVOLVING DOOR.) RUMOR, n. The Wall Street equivalent of a fact. STOCK MARKET, n. A chaotic hive of millions of people who overpay for hope and underpay for value. The stock market serves not to allocate capital efficiently from those who have a surfeit of it to those who can put it to productive use in corporate enterprises; rather, it serves to humiliate those who think they know what the future holds. The stock market is a mechanism for putting a price tag on surprises. It transfers wealth from the arrogant to the humble, from those who trade the most to those who trade the least, from those who think they know the most to those who admit they know the least, and from those who pay commissions to those who collect them. Those who "play" the stock market as if it were a game will lose. Those who respect it as a force of nature will prosper, but only so long as they are humble and patient"-- Provided by publisher.

Jason Zweig became a personal finance columnist for the Wall Street Journal in 2008. He was a senior writer for Money and a guest columnist for Time and CNN.com. He is the author of Your Money and Your Brain, one of the first books to explore the neuroscience of investing. Zweig is also the editor of the revised edition of Benjamin Graham's The Intelligent Investor, the classic text that Warren Buffett has described as "by far the best book about investing ever written." Before joining Money in 1995, Zweig was the mutual funds editor at Forbes. Earlier, he had been a reporter-researcher for the Economy & Business section of Time and an editorial assistant at Africa Report, a bimonthly journal. A frequent commentator on television and radio, Zweig is also a popular public speaker who has addressed the American Association of Individual Investors, the Aspen Institute, the CFA Institute, the Morningstar Investment Conference, and university audiences at Harvard, Stanford, and Oxford. Zweig was for many years a trustee of the Museum of American Finance, an affiliate of the Smithsonian Institution. He serves on the editorial boards of Financial History magazine and the Journal of Behavioral Finance.