(View entire post here)

Penguin Group (USA) Dominates The New York Times Bestseller Lists Across All Categories and Holds Four of the Seven #1 Adult Slots on The New York Times Bestseller Lists, for the Fourth Time in Five Weeks

Penguin Group (USA)'s excellent New York Times bestseller performance continues to roar across the breadth of our publishing programs. We achieved New York Times bestsellers in every category, from hardcover fiction and nonfiction to trade paperback and mass market, as well the Advice, How-to & Misc. and children's lists, for the week of January 20th.

Penguin Group (USA) holds four of the seven #1 adult slots on The New York Times bestseller lists, for the fourth time in five weeks, with A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini (Riverhead) #1 on the adult hardcover fiction list ; In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan (The Penguin Press) debuting on top of the adult hardcover nonfiction list; Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert (Penguin) at #1 on the adult nonfiction paperback list for the 35th time, in its 50th week on the list overall; and Iron Kissed by Patricia Briggs (Ace), on top of the adult mass market fiction list, her first #1 New York Times bestseller, in its second week.

(View entire post here)

A lot of people wonder how I came up with the Maximum Midcap strategy featured in the 2008 edition of The Neatest Little Guide to Stock Market Investing. It's wildly popular with readers and onlookers because it has beaten more than 95% of all mutual funds in the past five years.

In the first edition of the book way back in 1998, I focused the permanent strategy portion of the book on traditional ways of beating the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Those usual ways are the Dow Dividend strategies, which seek to beat the overall Dow by buying the 10, 5, or fewer stocks that provide the highest dividends. It's a good approach, but not great.

In the second edition in 2004, I discovered that by just doubling the returns of the entire Dow I could beat all of the Divend Strategies over time.

In this third edition, I took that a step further by finding an entirely new index with which to beat the Dow. What I wanted was a group of stocks that rose higher in strong markets and fell lower in weak markets. "Could there be such an index?" I wondered.