Stock-market

This wonderful tome, with its flowing prose, can teach even the most broken down of brokerage horses how to be a top producing stockbroker. Perfect reading in that rented cessna with the horse down below in the cargo bay or on the beach in Monaco on a "business lunch". More fun to read than a pile of GONEX prospecti.

I've been a managed director on The Street for over twenty years and I've seen a lot of retail stockbrokers come and go. If your book is taking a hit due to the internet this is a must read. I'm sipping chardonay and working on the backswing.

I've been a managing director for over 20 years on the street and if my brokers had this resource I would have won a lot more trips to the South of France and other exotic locales. For every broker with a book this is a must read.

In a book about poor recommendations, I find it hilarious that the authors give their own market opinion, which has proven to be incorrect.

Page 119, in reference to Abby Joseph Cohen's S&P 500 forecasts:

"Last we heard she was still calling for a twelve-month of 1,150. From 835, that's a pretty heady reacceleration."

Last I heard, the S&P was at 1.110. That's up 36% in 9 months, 3 months left in the twelve-month forecast. Hopefully, no one was listening to the author's opinion in early 2003.

This book chronicles the hype, promotion, conflicts of interest and outright lying by the financial media, pundits and corporate leaders. It also shows the serious recriminations for the few analysts and brokers who went against the market madness of the late '90s. On any financial bulletin board today, "strong buys" issued by the large brokerages are normally perceived as a sure sign that they want to dump stock on the naive small investor. I trade the stock market almost daily, and eshew all the major media new sources - the hype, no matter how absurd, never ends. This small book confirms my worst, cynical beliefs. Read it and laugh, read it and weep.

The authors have performed a valuable service in providing this record of the mania.

I predict it will occupy the same position in future study of stock market history of this period as has a similar account of the 1920s experience.

(Surprisingly there's already enough new material associated with the 2003 stock market rally for a sequel)

A stunning simple and in-depth analysis of the working of Buffet's brain presented by Mary Buffet in her case by case detailed study on how Buffet did his investments. It' so simple that the beauty of compounding power in investment manifests its own way; the first thing is to figure out what are return on equity and annual rate of return growth rate quantitively and also qualitatively understand the prospect of underlying business- which is the one I think most difficult to learn because one can hardly match Buffet's insight and experience.

This book remind me of Peter Lynch's books- looks so simple- but much better in providing numerical approaches which I could use in daily investments.

Buy the calculator + do the work = financial independence! Do it!

Buffettology is an amazingly comprehensive and complete text on everything you ever wanted to know about Buffett's analytical stock-picking tools.
The book is divided into two parts. The first is a detailed overview of the qualifications that Buffett takes into account when examining a company in order to determine its merit as an investment. The second part expands on these qualifications by providing step-by-step instruction on the actual mathematical equations that Buffett uses both to determine if a company satisfies his criteria and to determine if that company's stock is selling at a reasonable price. Do not be daunted by the math; it is actually rather simple, and the author provides sufficiently concrete examples so that you can easily perform the same sequential procedure when analyzing companies on your own.
If you are at all intrigued by how the man possessing the title of "World's Greatest Investor" picks his stocks, then you MUST read this book!

Despite Mr. Hassett's track record with his previous book "Dow 36,000," I saw him appear on CNBC during the early morning show and thought that he did well enough that I should buy the book. He promised that you could use his book to figure out what stocks were overvalued and which ones weren't. A pretty important topic given the current market environment. However, after reading this short book I have no idea of how to actually rank stocks on the 1 to 6 scale that he uses. He doesn't actually provide concrete examples, only that he says that he put together this ranking and it worked really well. My other problem is that if this approach works so well how come he didn't use it when his "Dow 36,000" book came out when the stock market was at its peak. Some explanation would have been useful for why Hassett, who is marketing this book as a full proof approach to spotting bubbles, wasn't able to use this approach himself over just the last couple of years to warn people and predict which stocks were going to crash, a period when he was supposedly writing this book. Claiming that you use a not clearly stated formula to identify overvalued stocks after they have already crashed seems like a scam to me.

The young co-author of Dow 36,000 writes a summary of theories regarding financial bubbles. (Thank goodness he doesn't pursue the earlier book's theory on the stock market's risk premium.) Unfortunately, this is not a practical bubble detector.
This is a quick, pithy read with lots of information and a bibliography to point the way for further study. He contrasts the efficient market theory with other ideas that suggest the market can be beaten. It's too bad this book is not longer and more substantial. Maybe Devil Take the Hindmost or Tulipomania would make a nice follow up to this simple intro.

I saw a favorable review in the New Yorker so I took the plunge and bought the book, even though I never read finance books. This is one of the most interesting books I have ever read. While its easy to say there was a bubble after the fact, this book looks at the work of the real scientists who have been searching for hard scientific evidence of bubbles. The book has very well done dialogues that help make the material entertaining. I never expected that the search for bubbles would provide so much insight into how the world works.

Take power back from executives, admonishes this shareholder advocate. Should be a great read for investors who want to be active without trading all the time.

Most investment books are written for speculators. They focus on a strategy for picking stocks though market timing, technical analysis, finding value stocks that are under priced, or growth stocks with good prospects. The problem is that over time, none of these methodologies achieve returns superior to the market average. As more and more investors realize this, they have chosen to invest in index funds. Yet, the more we do so, the less efficient our markets become since capital is no longer allocated to companies that produce the greatest wealth for each dollar invested.

Jacobs identifies our most common fallacy; treating stocks like commodities. Each share of stock represents ownership and a vote in what is to be done with corporate assets. Index investors spread their stock holdings so thinly, they minimize any influence they can have on each company. Break the Wall Street Rule is about how to be an effective owner, how to focus your attention on factors over which you can have some control, rather than the market. It is the first book written specifically for intelligent individual investors. (for more, see http://www.corpgov.net/abreviews1.html#Jacobs)