Investment-management

The author has examined investing from many different angles to provide you with access to helpful investment information that you would probably never find otherwise. When you do searches for investment related sites, you get back thousands of references. Using this guide, you can pick a few outstanding sites in areas you are interested and investigate them to find the one or ones that best fit your needs.

For stocks, this book tells you where to find out about each market in the world, stock picking and trading strategies (including day trading), research and analysis, IPOs, and quotes. A similar level of detail is available for bonds, options, commodities, and mutual funds. Other sections cover important topics like money management (debt, savings, financial planning, tax planning, banking, and insurance), on-line security, and investment clubs.

Each section lists a large number of sites. You can obviously go to all of them if you want to. But for some, a brief summary is provided in the back of the book. These are marked, so you can decide if you want a little more information before going to a site. Probably, though, it would be faster just to go to the site. One of the beauties of this information is that it will save you a lot of clicking, because you get the right page reference for the part of the site that you are interested in. That was really neat!

In all but a few sections, the author has picked out 1-3 as an "Editor's Choice Site" meaning that these are more highly recommended. Many of these are reproduced in the book so you can get a sense of what's there. This can save you futher time.

I spend a lot of time looking at investments on the Internet, but this book introduced me to a large number of helpful sites that I had not been to before. If I make just one invetment better, the price of the book will be a pittance compared to the benefit.

If you are an investment beginner, I recommend that you read books like Rich Dad, Poor Dad; How to Buy Stocks; ChangeWave Investing; and Common Sense about Mutual Funds before using this wonderful guide.

If you are an experienced investor, dive right in. Undoubtedly, there is some part of investing that you are skimping on. With these on-line resources, you can fill in those gaps profitably. My one quibble with the book is that it could have done a little more to make it clearer about which sites are free for which services, and what you have to pay for. In general, this is described, but being a cheap investor (see my review of Scrooge Investing) I just like to use the free resources. So I will spend some time here at sites that cost money, before realizing that I need not return.

Obviously, a book like this will quickly become obsolete, so get it now and use it now!

After you start using this great guide, I suggest that you think about other areas in your life where you may not be fully using on-line resources. How about career planning, job hunting, starting a business, buying items you use everyday, planning trips, getting custom products, and solving problems? You should then find ways to make the Internet help you in those areas as well. Otherwise, the loss is yours! The Internet can provide the basics for developing many 2,000 percent solutions!

Ms. Rowland has covered the financial planning beat for quite a while, and has benefited from watching carefully how the leading firms have developed. Anyone who thinks they need a different business model for their firm, or is about to start a new financial planning firm will benefit from reading and thinking about this book.

What kind of financial planning practice do you want? What kind of life style do you want? What kind of clients do you want to serve? What aspects of service do you want to do yourself, which parts have a staff to do and which parts do you want to outsource? How do you want to be compensated for your work? These are all pertinent subjects that are thoroughly explored in this book through detailed profiles of more than three dozen planners who span the gamut from single practitioners charging by the hour to occasional clients to larger firms that do everything for a single family throughout its many generations.

The book also looks closely at fees, expenses, and income attached to these different structures. No two planners do it the same way, and it looks like you have more choices than you think.

I found it refreshing to find that there's field where top performers can survive and prosper without working in large organizations. I was also impressed by the lifestyle advantages of offering limited, by-the-hour services.

I agree with Ms. Rowland's conclusion that life planning is not so new, and that large firms will not swoop up the whole industry. It wasn't clear where the efficiencies are that would make that possible . . . unless it would be to offer bare-bones planning for those with few assets by using software. But that's not the type of planning that most people in the industry want to do.

The book would have been improved if it had offered more analysis and a process for someone trying to pick a business model. Otherwise, the profiles were quite revealing and interesting. Although I operate as a management consultant, I find myself drawn into financial planning related issues (and yes, even life planning) when I work with entrepreneurs. So I felt it was valuable for me to learn from this book as well.

In Search of the Perfect Model is the most important practice management book of the year for independent financial advisors. It is well written, insightful, and thoroughly enjoyable!

This book well explains what is Value At Risk and the concept of risk management in banks. Business concepts are complete. The author gives a lot of weight in risk control.

However, he lacks to give detailed examples on how to calculate VAR, the mathematics/statistics behind. Spreadsheets are nice but not complete from the beginning to the end. Important statistical methods are described without enough detail leaving the concepts out the book's scope.

This is a good book for a financial engineer's library. I found the spreadsheet examples particularly useful.