Finance-Software

Investments by Frank Reilly. This college level text is a wonderful source of information for beginning investors as well as seasoned Registered Representatives. The material is presented in a fashion that is easily understood with several examples and stories to illustrate the theories and practices of all investments. Not only does this book cover the traditional topics of Equity and Debt investments it also covers the ins and outs of futures, commodities, derivatives, currency and precious metals. The first chapters lead off with an indepth explanation of the markets for each investment and how investments get to market. The techinical discussion of bringing an issue to market and the financing of corporate america is very helpful and enlightening. 13 years after graduating with a degree in Finance I still refer to this excellent work by Frank Reilly for everyday information.

It is a text book vs a simple reading book, however the author has done an excellent job of presenting the concepts in simple to understand format. With well writtem text and informative graphs the concepts easy to understand. Covers all types in investments instruments from stocks, bonds, options, futures and portfolio construction.

Dr. Sindell's book, Investing Online for Dummies, met my expectation for transitioning my investment knowledge from phone, fax, and written investment research data to navigating in the morass that is the Internet. The benefit that I have received from reading this book will result in more timely investments, and more informed choices regarding which investments to make. As the old saying goes, "time is money", and this book will save you time, and make you money! A definite "must read" for investors that are just starting to transition to investing on-line.....

Investing Online for Dummies,2nd Edition is extremely well written and well organized. It is a must have book!!! It doesn't matter if you are a beginning investor or more experienced... you need this book as a reference and guide. Dr. Sindell has done an excellent job of simplifying and clarifying a complex subject. This book can help you make a lot of money.

This book does not only explain how to invest online but it also explains investing in simple terms for beginners. Being in my 20s, I know very little about investing but this book helped me get through all the "street lingo". Just a little caveat--some of the information about online companies may be outdated--which is to be expected since it was published last year. This should not pose a problem as long as you do some minimal research on your own.
What I really like most about this book is that it is well-organized. The book is organized to be read either from cover to cover, or randomly. Both ways work as I found out. Although almost all of the information you find here can be found on the internet for free, its nice to have the information in an easy-to-read, well-organized book. Because of the openness of the web the information you get might be either suspect or overwhelming (believe me there's a lot of information out there!) or worse it could be both. This book solves that dilemma, and the headache I get after staring at the computer monitor for hours sifting through so much information. If you're planning to invest your hard-earned money, start by investing your $20 on this book.

I'm missing something here: the apparent feasibility of the author's stock-picking techniques with my little PC?

I found the floppy disk accompanying the book unreadable. My local computor builder/dealer/consultant couldn't read it either. My computer kept calling for another disk, which did not come with the book I ordered or with its replacement. The disk seems to herald back to the days of DOS; whatever, I'm lost.

More on the downside, the valueline online survey is unmanageable for me (I got a masters in English and I've been studying and investing stocks for 25 plus years). Determining the average for numerous search fields (market cap., P/E ratio, Price/Book ratio, etc.) that O'Shaughnessy calls for cannot be done with the basic online service. A simple piece of data such as "dividend" or "yield" can be tough to pin down with 7-8 different kinds listed (estimated, quarterly, current, etc.).

The book, in spite of my moronic protests, is praiseworthy. The methods make sense. There is something beautiful about their simplicity - the step by step processes of narrowing down fields in order to determine the best bargains (value) or the best upside potential (growth).

A guiding principle of O'Shaughnessy's argument - the answer to the nagging question of why so many portfolio managers fail - is very simple: they either have no useable plan or they do, but they don't stick to it.

I'm convinced this book has the answer. It's just so damn grueling to apply the principles; a dozen calls and emails to valueline still leave me clueless.

His theory is that by analyzing the holdings of top mutual funds, and then determining how they differ most from the index, you can then emulate the mutual fund's performance.

You can even improve on the performance of mutual funds because you can follow their strategy in a more consistent fashion and because you can reduce their strategy to its essential elements. Often even good fund managers are not entirely consistent.

An example of a strategy is: from the stocks with

12 month EPS gain >20% and
26 week % price change>20% and
Last Qtr EPS % chg > 20% and
Valueline Timeliness Rank <=5

Pick the ten stocks with highest estimated EPS growth for next year .

He explains how to do all this in detail and derives some good looking strategies. Risk is taken into account and proves to be a very useful measure of the reliability of a strategy.

You can use the same techniques to evaluate your broker's recommendations, and the advice from books and newletters. Do they follow a strategy or is it just random tips and hunches?

He also showed how various fund managers changed strategy quite radically without announcing it eg Magellan in the early 1990s.

There are some good tips on how to avoid common traps when using quantitive strategies eg using single variable strategies.

He also explores combining various strategies and shows how to build your own.

He did not really prove his theory which is that noone really makes money by individual stock picks, it is all strategy.

As a final caveat, if you don't like numbers you will not like this book. But it seems you cannot succeed in investment without being very friendly with numbers.

It's been 6 years since this book was published, and I believe that many of the fundamental items identified by the author still apply. Most investors are looking for rules for identifying good stocks, and using these techniques offers someone a way to actually test the results they could expect - at least if you're willing to use a service like ValueLine. The only downside of the book was in the lack of exploring additional ideas - things like shorter holding periods, stop-loss strategies, diversification across industries, etc. For the price, buy it!

Your book definitely saved me a LOT of work preparing to teach my QuickBooks classes. I found the exercises to be just the right length for what I'm doing. The good news is that I learned a thing or two from the book myself!