If anyone knows about having a lot on the line, it’s Jordan Walters of the Silicon Valley branch of the investment house Smith Barney. Jordan is exactly the kind of person you’d look for in a financial planner: he’s calm, he’s thoughtful, and he always takes the time to listen. As we sat down in his office and sipped from the minibar-sized can of a

Some investors—Warren Buffett, for example—like to look at the “market to book” ratio. Buffett often tries to find companies that are trading at a market cap close to or even below their book value.

the wisdom of Benjamin Graham, author of Security Analysis, who wrote that in the final analysis the stock market is not a voting mechanism but a weighing mechanism.