An Introduction to Risk and Return from Common Stocks

Richard Brealey's slim MIT Press survey remains one of the clearest introductions to modern investment theory ever written for a non-specialist audience. Written in the late 1960s and updated in 1983, it walks readers through the random-walk hypothesis, efficient market theory, and portfolio construction without leaning on heavy statistics. The New York Times called it worth more than six get-rich-quick books combined, and that praise still holds as a foundational primer. The honest caveat: the empirical examples are decades old, and the scope is equities only — no bonds, no alternatives. For anyone wanting to understand why markets behave the way they do before layering on complexity, this is a remarkably durable starting point.