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Barron's: The Dow Jones Business and Financial Weekly
Date of Review: Mar 14, 2008
The Bottom Line: Barron's is a very helpful, timely, financial publication.
Those who have large sums of money invested are usually avid followers of financial markets and avid readers of financial periodicals. There are several publications that talk the language of finance and one of them is Barron's, a magazine that ranks among the best known business publications.
Basic Contents of This Magazine:
Barron's is about 50 to 60 pages in length with departments like:
Market Week- This is a collection of departments that keep readers in tune with interest rates, commodities, stock market trends, etc.
Index to Companies- This is a quick rundown of any and all companies mentioned somewhere in the present issue.
Mailbag- These are letters to the editors, complete with replies from Barron's personnel.
Classified- Business services, businesses for sale, and other like advertisements can be found in this section.
The remaining pages of Barron's include different columns and featured articles. These form the bulk of each issue and there are about twenty of these in each weekly copy.
Magazine Web Page/Pricing:
To find Barron's on the world wide web, visit barrons.com. The web site for Barron's is very good, with articles taken from the latest issue, daily market updates, and educational material about investing.
Barron's is a costly magazine, selling for a base rate that varies widely based on the source. Some magazine retailers offer Barron's for only about $95 per year while other sites demand $180 or more for the same one year subscription deal. Potential subscribers need to shop around for the best deal.
Final Thoughts:
Barron's is a popular magazine that bills itself as the Dow Jones Business and Financial Weekly. This magazine (which is really a newspaper) offers dozens of articles each week on financial topics of different types. Articles can cover specific companies, industries, profit news, precious metals investing, interest rates, and virtually any other related topic.
Many people who read Barron's head directly to the Market Week section in order to catch up on the latest investment prices. Each issue offers extensive stock tables for the New York Stock Exchange, NASDAQ, American Stock Exchange, and exchange traded portfolios. Commodities, Options markets, foreign stock markets, bonds, mutual funds, and other financial prices are also noted. There is even a section titled Market Laboratory that offers analysis of different industries, historic Dow Jones closing averages, and more. Barron's knows that this is a popular part of each issue, so they include it in its own section (designated by an "M" in front of the page number), right in the center of each issue, so it can be pulled out and read separately.
One unique quality with Barron's is the large number of featured articles and regular columns in each issue. The departments, as you can see from the list above, comprise a small portion of each issue. In fact, if you take away the Market Week section, the remaining departments cover only a few pages in each issue. The rest is dedicated to short articles about specific companies, economic concerns, innovative technology, Wall Street trends, and other noteworthy topics. The columns feature writers like Mark Veverka, Alan Abelson, Shirley Lazo, and others. They can generally be counted on for some good reading and some sound financial advice.
Barron's is a very expensive publication, but among its many good points is the fact that it is published weekly and therefore is very up to date and timely. If you're an investor, you are fully aware of the importance of timely information and Barron's provides exactly that. Recent articles include topics like gasoline prices, recession worries, Microsoft's attempt to buyout Yahoo!, and other subjects of current concern. The timeliness is certainly one of Barron's greatest assets, and it helps to partially justify the high price of a subscription.
Barron's is published as a newspaper, but unlike its competitive publication, the Wall Street Journal, Barron's is smaller in size- more like the Parade section in the Sunday newspaper but with more pages. Also, like a newspaper, there is no binding of any kind. This means the issues can easily fall apart, and it is common for my weekly copy of Barron's to arrive at my home with the pages folded and portions of the issue separated.
One other noticeable fact about Barron's is that devotes only a minimal amount of space to advertisements. The ads are certainly there, and they are usually clustered in the first part of each issue. Most all of the ads are financial in nature, with ads for mutual fund companies, insurance, online brokerage services, and the like. Because the ads are almost all about finance, they tend to blend into the articles and you do not notice them like you notice the ads in other magazines.
Overall, Barron's is one of the best financial publications available today. The articles are quite thorough for such a short magazine and while some articles can get a little too advanced for the novice investor, there is still much to be learned in every issue of Barron's. Timely financial data, great writing, and relevant articles make Barron's a magazine worth reading for those with an interest in the subject of finance and investments.
