Information best means to achieve wise investment

Spreading the risk through asset allocation low risk! High returns! A can't-miss investment opportunity! How many times have you tuned into your radio or TV and heard these phrases blasting out from some frenzied infomercial?

What you may not also be tuning into is the rapid-fire sotto voce warning at the end: "Past performance is not indicative of future results. The risk of loss exists in all trading. Only risk capital should be used when investing."

"Well everyone knows that," you may say to yourself. "What kind of fool thinks there is such a thing as a sure thing in the stock market?"

What kind of fool indeed.

Idiomatic language is full of pithy sayings such as "There's a sucker born every minute," and "A fool and his money are soon parted." So how can you avoid singing the refrain, "What kind of fool am I?"

Check out these books and Web sites and find out how much risk an investor should/could comfortably assume and how an investment portfolio should be structured to spread this risk among cash, equities, bonds, etc. through asset allocation.

Books @ The Library

Definitely not for the beginner, "Effi-cient Asset Management," 332.6 M, assumes that you can handle terms such as "optimization error" and "re-sampled efficient frontier" without mental meltdown. Portfolio construction and management for the industry professional or sophisticated investor is included.

Subtitled "Protecting Wealth in Tur-bulent Markets," "Valuing Wall Street," 332.6 S, definitely is a timely read. The book doesn't require high-level math or conceptual knowledge. There's a minimum of jargon and plenty of helpful examples for anyone with at least fundamental market functionality.

The title of "Irrational Exuberance," 332.63 S, comes from a term that Alan Greenspan used to describe market highs in the good old days before the tech bubble burst. The author analyzes the structural and psychological factors that explain why the Dow Jones Industrial Average tripled between 1994 and 1999 and tells us how we can respond to poorer market performance. The concept of equities as the best long-term investment receives some close scrutiny.

Pertinent Web sites

www.moneycentral.msn.com/invest or/calcs/n_riskq/main.asp This tolerance quiz is designed to get you thinking about your attitude toward and capacity to handle risk. You'll be asked 20 questions; some typical investment portfolios will then be based on your answers. Candor on your part in answering the questions is recommended.

www.estrong.com/strongweb/strong/jsp/planning/tools/asset.jsp This is an asset allocation calculator which takes into account both return and volatility. After you answer a series of multiple-choice questions, the calculator determines the percentage of assets that should be invested in stocks, cash, and bonds. A sound night's sleep and your financial goals may both be within reach.

www.stockalpha.com/StockScreener.asp Identify stocks that match your level-of-risk comfort zone, based on market capitalization and industry sector. You can refine your search to set parameters for P/E ratio, dividend yield, beta, relative performance, et al. Output will include a valuation for each company that matches your criteria "moderately overvalued," "highly undervalued," etc. This site is easy to use.

(Mike DePue is the business librarian at the Library Center, 4653 S. Campbell.)