For those looking for a good stock market read, I suggest Wharton professor Jeremy Siegel's "The Future For Investors." Siegel's follow-up to "Stocks for the Long Run" (published the 1994) offers a very interesting and compelling outlook for stock markets throughout the world.

Not only are potential challenges addressed (selling pressures due to retiring baby boomers and the rise of China and India as global economic powerhouses), but Siegel also presents characteristics of past market winners and losers, and how they will be affected in coming decades.

While he offers portfolio asset allocation advice toward the end of the book, with which some will agree and others will prefer to deviate from, I think the real value of the text is in the quantitative evidence Siegel offers from his extensive research and his outlook on the rest of the 21st century. This definitely will help investors think about their investment portfolios in a valuable and comprehensive way.

All in all, a must read for those interested in hearing opinions of a brilliant professor who called the top of the Nasdaq market bubble months before the collapse began.