Product disclosure statement, responsible entity, quadruple witching day, reverse mortgage, Ponzi scheme, Enronitis, oral ruling, corporate horoscope, CLERP, inverse yield curve, predatory pricing, Sarbanes-Oxley ... these are all expressions that investors might encounter in 2004.

Nick Renton, the author of Understanding the Stock Exchange, Understanding Investment Property and many other books, has produced a new edition of his popular dictionary of investment terms and acronyms.

It caters for ordinary people who are interested in saving and investing but who are befuddled by the jargon in common use and by the many abbreviations in circulation.

Presented in plain English, this book covers everything from family trusts to yield, from imputation to monetary policy and from securitisation to capital gains tax.

This new enlarged edition has been updated to the beginning of 2004 and contains about 650 additional entries. It explains a wide selection of investment, economic, accounting, taxation, legal and mining terms in common use. The dictionary now contains many terms not found in similar works.

Some important topical concepts are dealt with at greater length - for example, guarantees, stock exchange indices, margin lending, derivatives and the return on equity. The book also includes many useful statistics and the ASX codes of all 1550 listed companies.

This book will also be welcomed by persons puzzled by jargon, such as those who find themselves confused when told to put their ETP into a DIY fund with a high IRR because it holds CUFS, CHF and CMBS in order to outperform the DJIA.

Maurice Newman, the chairman of the Australian Stock Exchange, says of the work in his foreword: "I am sure it will provide a useful reference for all those investors who want to demystify the jargon and understand the terminology."

On a lighter note, the book features some fascinating "definitions from hell" and also two specially written pieces on old scrip as collectors' items and the use of metaphors by investors.

The book is dedicated to all investors who don't know the difference between a green shoe and a black box.

412 pages   9781920910020   RRP $A29.95