As some of you may have heard, for the past year and a half or so, I've been working at a certain financial firm located at Sixth Avenue and 45th Street. As part of my job, I've been required to learn more about finance and investing than I ever wanted. On this blog, I'm usually much more interested in posting about new movies and bad dates than about finance (except to occasionally point out the misadventures of various random hedge funds). However, I feel like making a rare financial post this weekend, both because of a certain blessed financial event that took place on Saturday, and because it beats trying to write this novel.

Over the past year, I've been forced to take three stockbroker's licensing exams, read textbooks like titles like Options Markets and Modern Portfolio Theory, and remember the difference between "convertible preferreds" and "convertible debentures." I also went through a sorry period last summer where I browsed through almost every book in the business section of the Barnes & Noble at Lincoln Center. However, I've come to the conclusion that nobody needs to know more about finance than can be absorbed by reading three good books over the course of a long weekend. The first is Burton Malkiel's A Random Walk Down Wall Street, which allows you to put together an index fund portfolio that you can create and forget about for the rest of your life, except for an annual rebalancing, and still expect to outperform the vast majority of professional investors. (Try it! We can compare notes in thirty years.)

The second book is Andrew Tobias's Only Investment Guide You'll Ever Need, which covers most of what Malkiel doesn't in a very readable and amusing fashion. Andrew Tobias is also worth a glance online, as I've mentioned before, although these days, you're more likely to encouter a spirited discussion of his sensible political views than anything about personal finance. (Tobias is the treasurer of the Democratic National Committee.) As my parents already know, I'll recommend Malkiel and Tobias to anybody who wants to listen, and have even thought about giving copies of their books to all of my friends. I abandoned this plan only after realizing that it was incredibly lame.

The third "book" consists of Warren Buffett's collected letters to the shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway, which are archived on this site. (The release of Berkshire's annual report for 2003 is the "blessed event" that I mentioned a few paragraphs above.) As many of you probably know, I'm an index fund slut, but I also own a few shares of Berkshire, not because I necessarily believe that it will outperform the broader market (at this point, as Buffett himself points out, it probably won't), but because it serves as an interesting lens for looking at finance. Obviously, you don't need to own Berkshire to profit from Buffett's free advice, but having a personal stake in his company does tend to focus the mind a bit.

In his annual letter, Buffett comes across as a homespun sort of guy, full of corny jokes and asides. (A literary affectation? Probably. But I still think that Nat would get along with Buffett if they ever met at a barbeque.) And his opinions, as expressed in each year's letter, are second only to Greenspan's in their ability to make headlines. In this year's letter, in addition to going over Berkshire's performance, he lashes out at poor corporate governance, mutual funds with bad management, and the Bush tax cut. And it contains one line that deserves to become a classic. Buffett, it should be noted, is the second richest man in the world, and is close to overtaking Bill Gates to become the first. In reference to the recent tax cuts, he writes: "If this is class warfare, my class is clearly winning."