Personal-finance

I double my money at least once every 6 months. If you are serious at all about making money in the stock market, then you're talking about selling options, not investing in the traditional way.

This book is good, that is if you want to double your money every 5 years. It is not powerful enough.

Bill Staton has a very simple investment plan. Buy stock in companies that have a great long term record(he provides a list of over 400) and hold them as long as they continue to perform. Not very exciting or complex, but it should work great. With deep discount brokers not offering trades for as little as $8, I think he should spend more time pointing out the advantage of using them over using DRIP plans. I would think that his investment plan would be better than the way that over 90% of investors now invest. His book is very easy to read.

Staton provides a clear and simple method of building a solid portfolio of stocks representing America's best companies. His advice to the reader is -- buy and accumulate periodically, a small number of stocks belonging to America's Finest Companies (and there are over 400 of them in his book) and to sell rarely. Which is exactky what super-investor Warren Buffett does. Staton also explains what kind of stocks to choose if your account is taxable and what type of stocks would be suitable for a tax-sheltered account like an IRA. And if the reader doesn't ever want to pay a broker, Staton provides a list of America's Finest Companies that allow investors to invest directly with the companies. The only thing that I missed seeing in his book was a list of companies that might make it to the list in subsequent years IF they maintained their progress. A lot of investors would be interested in such "stars on the horizon".

If you subscribe to AOL, you must get this book. Mr. Venditto guides you through the maze of resources available at AOL (stock quotes, financial news, mortgage and real estate services, bulletin boards, forums) as well as those available on the Internet (the Web, mailing lists, chat rooms, etc.). The book is a joy to read, avoiding complex jargon that is common in many finance books. Highly recommended! Ira Krakow Publisher, Persfin-Digest Mailing List

Annual stock market returns of 25% such as those of the past five plus years are not the norm. With the recent slowdown in the markets, there is a need to discover other ways to invest and make money. John Thomchick's informative book takes you on an easy to understand journey to the many avenues of personal financial growth. This book has something for investors of all levels of experience and should be required reading for anyone looking to become a more well rounded investor.

Mr. Thomchick's book is easy to read and understand. He presents a novel way to view the markets. This book is great for the starting investor and a great reminder of basic principles for the more experienced investor,especially in these days of a difficult stock market. You will not regret buying this often humorous and always insightful book.

The authors, due to space considerations, do not include the nature and source of incomes used for their comparisons. Without this information, how can one determine if they fit the profile used.
Without knowing the amounts of various sources of incomes used,
I find the book of little use.

As a current Amazonian I looked forward to reading this book by a former colleague. Unfortunately, Mr. Marcus' work falls far short of expectations. Covering much of the same ground as Mike Daisey in "21 Dog Years..." and Robert Spector in "Get Big Fast," the author brings neither Daisey's sweaty sense of humor nor Spector's euphoria about e-commerce to a look at the first years of Amazon.com. Marcus seems light on the facts (he messes up more than a small number of time frames) and bored by his subject matter. As a writer I expected a better story and as an insider I know that there is more that he could have told. Sadly, this is not the definitive book on Amazon.com.

Unlike Mike Daisy's sarcastic take on life at Amazon.com or Robert Spector's more serious look at the business of Amazon, James Marcus takes you to right into the soul of the company during its early days. Serving as a memoir to the era, rather than a definitive work about the company, Marcus accurately captures the essence of the rise and fall of the dot.com culture from the inside.

From descriptions about the unconventional hiring practices, to the eclectic mix of personalities and the nuances of dot.com "etiquette" you can live or, as in my case re-live, the craziness of working for a company while it creates its own corporate structure...in 5 short years. I also like the fact that he decided to talk frankly about the acquisition and dissolution of our paper wealth, as this was a topic that permeated the culture.

However, while I was reading, I kept wondering whether anyone who didn't work at Amazon.com during its early days would find it as satisfying to read? I can think that if they choose to read it they will find an entertaining, well-written book that from a personal level captures the culture of Amazon.com and incorporates the economic boom and bust of the late nineties.

For me, as a former employee from 98-02, the book will as "my" memoir. A place I can go to for window back into the things I loved about working there and the changes that occurred as it became more corporate and the culture shifted.

'amazonia' by former amazon.com senior editor James Marcus is a memoir of that company's fifty-fifth employee, hired just a few months after the company moved from founder Jeff Bezos' garage in Seattle, the home of tech giant Microsoft and the fast becoming mythical Bill Gates.

In spite of the high tech world in which amazon.com moved, it's operation, at least from what the reader can glean from these pages, was remarkably low-tech, and this may be a source of disappointment to some readers of this book, which is much, much more of a personal memoir than it is a chronicle of the company and its times. It is also done from the perspective of a non-technical literary editor who, in 1996, was not conversant with the few tech totems encountered in the book such as HTML and UNIX.

One of the very few insights into amazon.com's technology was given when, in that same year, early in his employment, Marcus had to rotate the content of the site, thereby bringing the current internet content off-line and bringing an updated copy of the site content on line. By 1996, this technique is incredibly primitive, and the fact that it is being done by a copy editor signals an utterly 'fly by the seat of your pants' operation. It is an expected relief to a frequent amazon.com user and customer to have the author say that times changed and the company Information Technology staff soon would not let a copy editor within two solid doors of a terminal capable of doing this task. Even so, this is pretty tame stuff. In 1996, working in Information Technology for a pharmaceutical company, we were doing database based content which was more sophisticated than this, and our business was drugs, not Internet content.

But, this is all a symptom of the fact that this book is not about technology. It is about marketing and people and organizations. Unfortunately, the principle characters in the book, lead by amazon.com founder and CEO Jeff Bezos simply does not have the kind of larger than life presence of Bill Gates of Microsoft or Larry Ellison of Oracle Corporation. Bezos simply comes across as a talented stockbroker with a good idea and the chuzpah to pull it off.

One of the stronger lessons of the book is that in struggling to survive, organizations have little or no mercy regarding the lives of it's employees, even an organization like amazon.com, born in the very enlightened atmosphere of 1990s United States. One of the most common occurrences repeated thousands of times in hundreds of larger organizations is the story of how the author's performance rating was dropped from a 4.5 out of 5 down to a 3.6, even after a staff reduction, due to rankings being mapped to the famous bell shaped curve, where there must be a lot more ratings in the middle of the scale than there are at the top of the scale. It is no surprise at all that this policy was imported from Microsoft.

The thing which makes this book so interesting is the fact that amazon.com is a great success story, being one of the most prominent survivors of the bursting tech bubble which deflated at the end of 2000. Of course, the story of amazon.com's IPO and the fortunes of its stock prices and the author's options values are a central theme of the book. One could wish just a little reflection on what made amazon.com work where others did not.

Ultimately, the book was interesting. I am glad I read it and it provided useful insights into young organizations. But, it was not what I was hoping for, and it had little of the drama surrounding other computer epics from the creation of Colossus during WWII by Alan Turing to the rise and fall and rise of Apple, Microsoft, IBM, and Oracle.

This is a good read, an interesting personal memoir, and a nice insight into a small part of the Internet boom. I just love the irony of writing a review for amazon.com of a book by an editor of reviews for amazon.com.

A quick read and waste of time. Information contained in the book generally available to anyone in al public forums.

Alzheimers Disease, fighting for finacial survival did not live up to my expectations. The Author clearly has "issues himself" and the biggest one is thinking we need his advice. The title is very misleading. There are many caring books on Alzheimers that include a short chaptor telling all we need to know about nursing homes etc. and protecting your money. There are no magic bullets contained in this book as the title implies and I would return it if I could.

The book isn't about Alzheimers at all. It's simply a rehash of publicly available info on transferring your assets before someone enters a nursing home.