I have a finance MBA from a top-tier school, 10+ yrs business experience in a number of areas.
There's a pretty good magazine called "the bottom line". It's only a few pages long, but there are no advertisments and the business snippets are good. Tends to get repetitive after a year or so, but I'd recommend it.
For investing, go to janus' web site, or vanguard's. Motley Fool has a great one also. There are lots of free, online "investing courses" available.
Rules of thumb:
there's no such thing as a free lunch. If an investment promises higher returns, it will have higher risk. Government bonds are very low risk, very low return. Startup company stocks are the opposite. The best way to do well long-term is to have the right portfolio of investments, which will include some low risk investments to provide some safety, and some high risk investments to allow greater growth of the portfolio. This is beyond what I could do myself; suggest (at that point) you speak with an advisor who you pay on an hourly basis. Better to do this than to speak with a "free" advisor who is paid commission; the commission will be higher on some products they offer than others, guess which he or she will recommend to you?
For anyone you speak with, or anything you read, keep the point above in mind. Stock prices change based on changes in expected future cash flows. If you own Ford stock, and they have to recall all Mustangs for the past 20 years, their stock price will go down. If you own IBM, and they win a contract to do all Government computing for the next 10 years, their stock price will go up. If you read a blurb in a magazine stating that a company is a great investment, it's too late -- "the market" would be aware of this information and the stock price would have already gone up or down based on any new info in this article.
Short term (for your first couple hundred K in investments) you may want to consider an "index" fund. The idea is that around 2/3 of all stock funds do not beat the market, after you consider their expenses. And the ones that do beat the market change wildly from year to year; last year's winner may be this year's loser. An index fund, rather than trying to pick the best stocks, invests in a selected market equally; an S&P 500 index fund, for example, invests in the 500 largest publicly traded (IBM, Ford, Cisco) firms in the US. They don't have highly paid money managers; their computers determine when to trade based on changes in stock prices for the companies they hold; expenses are very low and returns are going to be close to the index as a whole.
