Jonathan Chevreau’s Findependence Day is an entertaining read. I picked it up for a review of some financial-planning topics but found myself flipping the pages to see what was going to happen next to the central characters. To make sure I didn’t miss some of the pointers, I skipped back through ...

Mutual funds have thrived despite a wave of critical studies and books, one of the latest being The Investor's Dilemma (2008) by Louis Lowenstein. In my May 22 column, Are mutual funds a rip-off? I offered some possible explanations why the industry has held up, such as the value-added derived ...