Foreword: Open Educational Resources (OER) - This Book is Free to Read

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“An author is a fool who, not content with having bored those who have lived with him, insists on boring future generations.” ‒ Montesquieu

OER Attributes and Benefits: "OER is sharing" by giulia.forsythe is marked with CC0 1.0

This book is written as an Open Educational Resource (OER). It is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. This means you can read it for free. If anyone is trying to get you to pay for this book, they are scam artists. If you have already paid the scam artists for this book, contact your credit card company and tell them you have been scammed and you want your money back. If you want to use this material for anything else other than for your own education, please read the above Creative Commons license agreement carefully. If you want to collaborate on this textbook as we keep it updated in the future, please contact me directly, especially if you are much smarter than I am. (We are setting the bar fairly low here, Folks.) We desperately need graphic artists and data experts. If you are a Technical Analysis expert, please contact us immediately! If you would like to translate this text to another language, please contact us immediately! We would love to have this become a group effort, especially for those teaching Introduction to Investments at the middle, high, and adult school, community college, and even university levels.

Okay, so why write a book about investing when there are already many great books about investing available? That’s a great question. The reason is a bit complicated. Nothing is perfect and that includes the world of academia. I have taught BUS-123, Introduction to Investments, at Southwestern Community College for 20 years now and have been a Registered Representative, also known as a Stockbroker, since 1998. I have been investing for far longer than that. If it were up to me, I would use The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham as our college textbook at Southwestern. It is the definitive work on investing written by none other than the teacher and mentor of Warren Buffett, the famed investor. But always remember our motto in academia: If it makes sense, we don’t do it. The Intelligent Investor is not a college-level textbook. It does not come from a college-level textbook publisher. A college-level textbook must cost at least US$340 for a book that is usually worth about US$29.95. In reality, The Intelligent Investor is far more rigorous than any college-level Introduction to Investments textbooks we have come across.

This is where Open Educational Resources (OER) comes in. Under their auspices, we can write a college-level textbook and have it blessed and kissed by the Academic Powers-That-Be. The reality is that this textbook is really just a restatement of the BUS-123, Introduction to Investments, class website. Websites also cannot be used as college-level textbooks even though, in my humble opinion and the opinion of many of our students, our website is also far superior to any college-level Introduction to Investments textbooks available. Again, if it makes sense, we don’t do it. So there! That is why we wrote this book.

The other reason is that, as the French philosopher, Montesquieu, points out above, I am very much looking forward to boring those who are living with me and all future generations to come.