Good investing approach, but poor writing and teaching methodology
938151
This book presents a very sound investing approach, but in my opinion, it fails to "teach" it to the reader. I felt that the biggest flaw of the book is the lack of depth in the reasoning for the presented strategies. For example, when the author suggests buying stocks on the rise, it does not thoroughly explain the reason why. In my opinion, that missing explanation is very necessary to fully understand why the author is recommending this. Also, the author goes on and on explaining irrelevant analogies, which at times made it extremely boring and hard to continue reading. I think cutting back on the extras and focusing on giving the reasoning behind every move would be a better idea.
3497778
On the positive side, Landon does a thorough job of exploring and presenting different ways to effectively write long sentences. But that's pretty much where the positive ends, and I have several major problems with this course:

1. I strongly disagree with Landon's premise that a focus on sentences is the key to efffective writing. In fact, I think he has it altogether backwards. It seems to me that any decent writer will first think about the overall messages of a document, will next work on structuring the document (chapters, sections, paragraphs, etc.), and will finally work on construction of sentences as the last step. And I think that good readers will approach reading the same way (distilling out ideas and arguments, not specific phrasings).

2. I also disagree with Landon's premise that longer sentences are generally to be preferred. The writing which I consider effective has a balanced mix of shorter and longer sentences. And I think that longer sentences are generally out of place in business and technical writing, so Landon fails to recognize that ideal sentence length depends on context, and his advice is often bad advice outside the context of writing fiction.

3. Landon doesn't seem to realize that the period at the end of the sentence is meant to give the reader the opportunity to pause and absorb what has been written to that point. Creating longer cumulative sentences by heaping on more and more content can put too much demand on the reader, to the point of being counterproductive. The richness that Landon seeks can often be achieved by using shorter sentences which flow well from one to the next. You don't have to do it all in one sentence -- ever heard of something called a paragraph?

4. The course is simply too long. Landon gives too many examples, has too much repetition, and spends too much time on ideas which are fairly obvious. In many cases, the content of two or three or even four lectures could easily have been combined into one lecture. Landon overexplains to an extent which makes the course very tedious, and I was in pain by around Lecture 8.

5. Given that writing is essentially an art (not a science), I find Landon's approach much too technical, with excessive use of arcane terminology. He has a gift for taking the fun out of writing. And I just don't see the need for all of this analysis -- do the best writers really take this sort of highly technical approach? I doubt it. I think the key to becoming a better writer is noticing and emulating the good writing of others, combined with lots of deliberate practice. Writing teachers may need to come up with this stuff to have something to 'teach', but that doesn't mean it's something students should 'learn'.

Landon begins to address some of my objections in the last two lectures, but it's a case of too little, too late. Moreover, the course should have been 12 lectures rather than 24, so a longer course isn't what was needed.

Considering all of these objections, I can give this course only 2 stars, and I can recommend it only to the (probably small) fraction of people who want to spend a lot of time looking (too) closely at different ways of writing long sentences. For everyone else, I think Landon's advice could be more harmful than helpful.
116981
This is an ok book on growth stock investing. It is aimed at the retail (non-professional) investor. The material on growth stocks, selection methodology, and avoiding emotional decisions are all worthwhile reading.

There is a fairly strong element of self-promotion evident, especially in the early chapters. Someone once said, "you might as well toot your own horn; no one else will do it for you." Even so, I find it detracts from an otherwise good book.

The "lifecycle of a stock" is the most important concept in this book, in my mind. Introduced on page 94 in the middle of the book, it is given too little attention. The whole book could have been written from the lifecycle perspective, examining the author's favorite eight fundamentals from that point of view. His point is that one needs not only a clear set of fundamental indicators to appraise a stock's value, but a methodology to adjust the indicator weightings over the lifecycle of the stock. Presumably one receives that value by subscribing to the author's newsletter service.

Navellier introduces a number of interesting concepts, such as his so-called "zig-zag" approach and "oasis" stocks." These terms refer to portfolio diversification strategies including holding stocks that are supposed to move counter to the general market trend. He also introduces the concept of what he calls the "60/30/10 mix" of conservative, moderately conservative and aggressive stocks. This apparently refers more-or-less to each stock's beta and more as combined by his proprietary formula. The final chapters of the book touch on global investing, corporate risks (financial frauds), political cycles that affect stocks and more.

Louis Navellier presents a systematic approach to long-term portfolio management that has generated outsize returns on his model portfolios as published in his investment newsletters, according to an industry ratings publication. It is clear, however, that there is secret sauce behind his quantitative approach that is only available to his subscribers. The methodology described bears a close resemblance to that of The Value Line(c) ranking system.

Compare this to another one of the "Little Books" series by Joel Greenblatt, a top hedge fund manager. He presents his methodology in detail in "The Little Book that Beats the Market," then directs the reader to a regularly-updated website where the user can generate lists of stocks that meet his or her personal criteria, all for free. I my view, a book like this, that purports to help smaller investors, is credible only if the investor comes away with a useable set of tools to put the ideas into action. On that score this book falls short. Nevertheless, this book contains good and useful information and is worth reading for educational value. I rate this book three stars: it's ok.
687056
This book came up in my Vine queue and as I do dabble in stocks it piqued my interest. Normally we get advanced copies of a book but this one looks to be a first edition.

This book appears to be part of a series as the author refers to other books and training classes.

I'm stuck on how to rate this book. I'm thought perhaps 3 but I'm wondering if it should really be a two because...the beginning of the book the Authors Notes states this book will not adequately teach his intra-day trading and swing methodology. He goes on to further say do not attempt to trade any of the procedures and/or rules mapped out in this book. Get hands-on training from the author. At the very least the title should be different and more accurately describe what this book is as I can't apparently day trade stocks the wall street way after reading this book.

Otherwise, the book is laid out well. I liked the way I can see the page lines along the outer edge of the book. Not sure if that was intentional or not. Writing is clear and understandable. Graphics and charts are clear and readable.
2227488
For many years Geraldine Weiss has published a newsletter that identifies stocks trading in the upper range of their historic dividend yields. This method succesfully identifies undervalued stocks.

Tengler took this a step further, comparing stocks' dividend yields to their historic relationship to the yield of the market as a whole. Like Weiss' less sophisticated technique, stocks selected in such manner will, on average, outperform the market. She then goes on to ask and answer the question of how to apply a similar technique to stocks with little or no history of dividend payments.  (Hence the "New Era" of the title).  The answer is to employ the Relative Price to Sales Ratio.

It is easy enough to obtain price-to-sales ratios for individual stocks, which are routinely published in a number of sources.  With a little work, an individual investor can then compare a PSR to the PSR of the market as a whole, obtaining the RPSR.  But actual application of this technique requires that you obtain the entire range of RPSRs going back years, i.e. "construct the RPSR charts for each company."  (p. 48).  How is this done? The very next sentence tells the tale, in parentheses:  "(This information is generally only available to institutional investors through services such as Compustat)."

Oh.

I feel much as I would had I bought some software through a mass market outlet only to find it runs only on an esoteric operating system used by the Department of Defense.

I won't deny that the ancillary criteria used to winnow the complete universe of low RPSR stocks is of some value (hence the two stars instead of one), but that is like saying you bought a dictionary because you like the way it covers "X", "Y" and "Z".

"New Era Value Investing" is essentially marketing material aimed at convincing trustees for institutional funds to place those funds under Tengler's management.  If you are not responsible for investing millions of dollars of other people's money, save your own and look for something better.
3971254
It's easy to get mixed feelings about this book. It tries to cram everything together, history, categories of precious metals, reasons for booms & busts, strategies for investing, etc. It also tries to simplify and explain things in everyday language - it is a 'dummies' book after all. That's all commendable.

However, somewhere in the process the book became full of errors like "gold is good in times of inflation" or that gold has intrinsic value of so-and-so (it has cultural store of wealth value with mania phases, not intrinsic value beyond it's industrial use), etc.

This wouldn't be so bad if so much of the advice given, like inflation hedging, wasn't so bad, so clearly out of whack with actual historical data from the past 100 years and if the reasoning wasn't so full of gold-bug mythology, a lot of which has been proven wrong by real historians, investors, traders and financial analysts. If the book had more graphs, many of the errors in the argumentation would be visible to even a casual reader. No wonder there are so few graphs.

Gold and precious metals are not a bad investment per se. One just has to understand how they function in different kind of circumstances. This book is not a reliable source to find that out, unless you already know your stuff and find the few gold nuggets from the rest of the mud in the book.

Not recommended, unless one knows the basics and by then it's way too simplistic. Two stars, because it actually also has factually correct information that can be useful (on mining companies for example) and because it reminds people that it's not just a question of "buy & hold and it'll go through the roof forever".

As a better partial alternative, I'd recommend The Goldwatcher: Demystifying Gold Investing by Katz and Holmes, although it's strictly gold only. Sane, well edited, reasonably argued and full of good advice on actual trading and investing in gold.
3479232
I gave this two stars because if you read it, you won't completely have wasted your time. As others have mentioned, it isn't well written. He speaks in generalities about the first four great investors, and I'm fairly certain there are paragraphs copy/pasted from one chapter to the next. Very repetitive. The only one of the four the author seems to have done any actual research on is William O'Neil, and Mr. O'Neil has several books available that are much better and give way more detail in how to actually carry out the strategies.

I'm glad I read the little book because it led me to this excellent book, but I really wish I had skipped it and went straight to the sources.
2118502
I had to put this book down after skipping pages, sections, chapters, etc due to the academic writing style (way too wordy) and the vague examples/formulas. Like another reviewer I'd suggest that someone take all of the information in this book and boil it down to something easily readable with concrete examples. I've read tons of investing and educational texts and was bored to tears with this one but gave it 3 stars as I think there are some good nuggets buried in it. My most recent investing book was Rule #1 and it seemed like a very simplied version but an easy, understandable read, so maybe I'll wait for the Cliff Notes ;) I'm a trader/investor and don't need one on my shelf to "appear" smart...anyone want to buy my copy of this book?!
2226492
First off, let me say that I have made a lot of money using the information in this book as a basis.  But I have found that the market has been changing over the past year or two to make the techniques in here less reliable.  I have had to work to tune the information in this book to be more suited for today's markets.
Most of the book is based around finding stocks that have a strong uptrend (or downtrend for shorting opportunities) by utilizing the ADX/DMI technical indicators.  Then, you look for a recent high and a pullback of a few days.  The idea is that these stocks will recover and shoot higher.  He gives a bunch of charts showing stocks during the tech boom reaching new highs, pulling back for 3 or 4 days, then shooting up to astronomical heights.  He also gives some variations on this same theme, but most are based on the ADX indicator.
While this is a good basis for finding plays, it does not yield many plays these days on a day to day basis.  I wrote software to search out the types of price movement he talks about.  In any given day, you will find maybe 20-50 (out of 3000 stocks I scan) stocks that loosely fit his criteria.  Out of these, there are maybe 10 that match his criteria, and the next day, maybe 1 stock will follow the pattern.  But I don't see many at all reaching the high from before the pullback, never mind shooting astronomically higher.
Further, to get anything out of this book, you will need software that is capable of scanning the market.  You will never be able to find these plays manually.
Thus, I can recommend this book if you have access to such software or are capable of writing your own software, as I did.  If you do, you can tune these techniques and do quite well for yourself.  But otherwise, I can't see spending [money]for this book, for the reasons mentioned above.
450328
I wanted to like this book.  But Nate Silver gives a detailed discussion of the stock market that tries to defend the efficient market hypothesis.  And his defense is based on entirely talks with professors at the University of Chicago that came up with that theory.  He gives no mention to the greatest investor of all time, Warren Buffett, or that his entire group of investors that studied at the foot of Ben Graham all had significant outperformance against the stock market for several decades each with their own take on value investing.

In addition Silver mentions that Option Trading is way too risky, demonstrating a complete lack of knowledge of the subject.  Option investing, when done correctly, allows significant risk/reward accomplished with many strategies that have much lower risks than just buying a stock.  These include Vertical Credit Spreads, Vertical Debit Spreads, Diagonal Spreads, Butterfly's, and even in the money generic calls and puts.  It's obvious Silver has never been exposed to these ideas, let alone understands them enough to make such a comment.

Finally Silver rejects technical analysis because it's difficult to tell the difference between some real charts and some charts that were used by a computer flipping a coin.  For one hasn't he heard of "Garbage in, Garbage out", so really this is no different than giving a statistician poll numbers by a random number generator within some would be reasonable parameters.  And secondly, isn't it possible there is more than one way for market technicians to look at a stock than just one kind of chart.

The other parts of the book seem authentic and interesting.  But if I can find such obvious flaws in areas where I have an expertise, then I have trouble trusting the rest of his thoughts on areas where I do not.
834627
This review is unlikely to make me friends, and likely to generate some negative mail.  Let me start with the conclusion: don't buy the book.  That said, my reasons for stating this are different from those who typically criticize Michael Covel.  I agree with much of what he says; I disagree with much of his rhetoric.  Let me give you my thoughts:

1) Momentum is a pervasive factor in the markets.  It works about 80% of the time and produces significant excess returns on average.  Behavioral finance points out that people are slow to adapt to new information, so momentum tends to work because the initial moves on new information aren't sufficient.  That said, when too many are chasing momentum, the market becomes extremely volatile, and the strategy ceases to work, until it shakes out enough momentum-followers.

What is hard, is distinguishing trend following from technical analysis from momentum.  Personally, I think momentum explains the other two.  It's a much simpler theory, and much as Covel appeals to Occam's Razor, I apply it back to him here.

2) He draws on a series of investors that have done well in the past, and touts them as proof of his theories.  Hindsight is 20/20.  What of those that have tried to apply trend following and failed?  Is it many or few?  Keeping a tight stop loss for some means the death of a thousand cuts.  The studies that I have seen show that frequency of trading tends to decrease returns.  Now, trend following does not necessarily mean a lot of trading, but for many it ends up being that way.

It is easy to locate a bunch of trend followers in hindsight, and tout their abilities.  What would be harder would be to find the whole universe of people following trends, and see how they do as a whole.

3) Mean reversion is a weaker factor, but still significant in making money.  Value investors typically do well with it, but only reliably when they insist on strong balance sheets.  I've studied mean reversion for years, and it exists in almost all markets as a weak factor.  Over enough time, that weak factor has punch, but in the short run, momentum rules on average.

4) Covel spends a lot of time trashing fundamental analysis, without much meat behind it.  Fundamental analysis works well, but doesn't have so much value because so many are applying it.  It's not like the situation Ben Graham found, where few were doing it.

Aside from that, technicians implicitly rely on fundamental analysis, because their support and resistance levels stem from the decisions of fundamental investors.  Same for those that follow trends.  The trends exist because fundamental investors react slowly to changes in the fundamentals, and trend followers exploit them.

5) There is no mention of the Adaptive Markets Hypothesis, and little discussion of Behavioral Finance.  These are much richer theories that encompass "trend following."

6) Covel takes "pot shots" at Buffett over issues that are unrelated to his main point in an effort to discredit him.  Buffett is a bright guy who can criticize derivatives in aggregate, while still using them in specific to his advantage.  (Cough, cough.  Please ignore his put option trades.)

7) There was not enough time spent on "how to trend follow."  After reading the book, if I didn't have prior background knowledge, I would be scratching my head to figure out how I could reliably pick investments in a trend following mode in order to make significant excess profits, as well as know where to sell them.

I don't recommend it, but you can buy it here: Trend Following (Updated Edition): Learn to Make Millions in Up or Down Markets

Final note -- Covel needs to grow up and learn that there are other factors in the market aside from momentum.  He has become a fundamentalist about "trend following" and does not seem to have the open mind that he harps about.

-=-=-=-==-=--=

Note: this book review generated a lot of controversy when it was published, so there are four follow-ups:
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1524651
Unfortunately, this book has to follow the amusing and rewarding "Little Book" of Joel Greenblatt in Wiley's series. Therefore, unfavorable and perhaps unfair comparison is unavoidable. I do respect the experience and attempt of Christopher H. Browne to write a small book on value investing, but I feel he comes up short. If it was a friendly talk at a club you could find it mildly entertaining, but if you are looking for value, well...

First, value investing is not a strategy where a magic formula or a magic list could break an entirely new ground. Yet alone a "Little Book". You read just one value investing book and "Buy Stocks On Sale", "Margin of Safety", "First, Do Not Lose Money", "Second, Do Not Lose Money" pretty much become recurring and familiar ideas. There is no magic ratio, magic anything in analyzing income statements, earnings predictions, book value etc, it takes hard, thorough work, experience, patience and knowledge. You have to know what to know. You have to know what and where to look at. You have to know why. You have to know what, how and where numbers can be altered with GAAP or else. In this regard a reader could have expected at least a general(novel?)framework, a way of thinking instead of the presented essay-type, list-type ("I also look at...") writing. Or, like in Joel Greenblatt's book, we could have been entertained with a "Jason's Gum Shop"-type metaphore/concept.

Second, a reader of this book is either a convert and firm believer of value investing (Buffett, Munger, Fisher books pack the shelf), looking for additional ideas, NEW concepts or aspects and will find nothing new here. Or, the reader is a beginner or a freshly burned growth (hype)investor entertaining a fresh start and will be turned down by a dry, uninspiring, unexciting, somewhat disorganized book. Quite possibly this reader gives up, will leave this book unfinished and subscribes to yet another advisory service or dumps her/his money into an index or mutual fund. That is, not many readers would be enriched here.

Third, value investing is truly a winning strategy. So do not give up or get discouraged by this book. (Phil Town, David Dreman, Mary Buffett, Philip A. Fisher are good starts.)
2401777
The useful thing about this book is two pages of tables that show the odds of improving after three, four, five and six cards dealt in 7-card and 7-card high/low split. And there are some good basic points, partially explained, about the different betting rules when fighting for a split pot. However, there are a number of basic useful rules that are omitted (presumably those were covered in his "Intro" book, now out of print) AND he explains that "there are likely some errors" in his statistical tables for "I am not a trained mathematician."
The problem is that the material is poorly written and organized, partially explained and loaded with white space and off-the-topic comments. It is a small book with large, 12-point type and lots of blank space. I counted only 24 pages that actually contained poker information. Writing about "Fifth Street" when drawing on a low flush draw:
 "Quite often the fifth street decision is a big one. When a great starting hand has caught some help and still has a chance to sweep, you are pressed to figure the odds and decide if you should continue. Supposed the A-3-6 of hearts has caught a black seven and a diamond queen. Should you play?
 "You have counted four hearts that appeared, so there are six not accounted for. One other player has a better low porch than you have. Two fours, one two, and three fives have appeared. It is clear you now have a one-way hand since you only have about a 4% chance for a flush.
 "This is one example of the pressure of fifth street. You do not have a good one-way hand, but it might make you a few dollars. You have to decide if it is worth the risk."
You also have to decide whether to buy this book--and that should be an easy decision. ...
4167205
I may yet "Pass the 65", in which case the book will have performed as intended, BUT

I find the hip/jivey writing style grating and distracting.

I'm using the book as a structured review of material I already 99% know. I have found a few outright mistakes in the text. Thus far (p. 110 of 500) the quizzes are error-free.

Some of the comments about investments, the economy, and the government are arguably true now (Summer, 2013) but are presented without historical context-- in other recent (and presumably future) investing environments, these comments were (will be) erroneous.

This is, after all, a study guide for a license to invest other peoples' money. IMO more care should be taken to give more general situational answers rather than topical toss-offs.

In fairness to the authors, I have not read any other Series 65 study guide, so for all I know theirs is the best of the bunch.
If that's true, though, I'm concerned that professional Investment Advisors are being given a wide but sometimes too shallow view of investing and economics.
2980723
As a Tasty Trader (look it up on the Internet), I was interested in a deeper understanding of selling option premium.  This book is a high level introduction to options followed up by one way to sell premium. It tries to walk you through your first trade to get you started.

Ignoring the lack of proof reading of the book, I think it doesn't do a very good job. It might work to get people interested in options and with further reading of other books and then coming back to reading the trading strategy to try out. While the trade strategy is good, I don't think the proper groundwork is presented to the reader. Concepts are sometimes mentioned and rarely explained (for a reader new to options). Approaches are mentioned and procedures are mentioned, but not explained enough for a reader a actually use.  Having followed Tasty Trade (the founder created thinkorswim mentioned in the book), I understood the ideas trying to be discussed or glossed over but someone new would be lost. However the suggested trading strategy is sound (similar to Liz&Jenny show "Wheel of Fortune" on TT).

I don't agree with the analysis that only naked puts are appropriate.  The reasons argued against credit spreads and iron condors also apply against naked puts, but naked puts are more disastrous to the trader.  Those strategies benefits are also discounted, but extremely important to smaller accounts.  Due to long tail risk, they are actually safer to a trading account and less impacted by increased volatility.  I still agree naked puts are a good strategy, just not the only good one.  Note: naked puts require experience trading options before a brokerage firm will let a client sell them. This is at odds with the intro to options attempted by the book.

The stocks to trade need to consider liquidity, volume, and spread.  The book should mention rolling ITM puts to collect more premium as a management strategy. The probabilities are not correctly mentioned in the book.  A one standard deviation put is at the 32 delta (68% OTM) and a one standard deviation strangle or iron condor uses a 16 delta (84% OTM) short put/call (because either side can be hit and the profit area is 68%). When talking about risk reward trade offs (not really discussed), there is no understanding that they are similar.  Overall, the expected P/L on the undefined risk trade is higher, but not significantly.  Higher OTM means more likely to be out of the money,but lower premium and larger losses when they go ITM, so there is a trade off to consider.  Talking about management techniques to improve profitability would also help.  From Tasty Trade research, closing at 50% max profit can turn a one standard deviation strangle (expected 68% OTM) to have a roughly 83% or higher probability of success. With rolling 53% of loosing trades can be profitable after about one roll. These types of strategies turn an even profitability trade into a likely steady income.

This book shows one of the better trades that not even options floor traders get nor recommend in their books.  As a result I think the book is on the right path.
1390591
I honestly thought that this book might open my eyes and get me off to a good start in investing, but just 2 chapters in and I was completely deflated! The book does hit on some good points about how to prepare to invest, to recognize your investment style/personality type and to really try and grapple with the how and why of investing but the book talks in such large dollar amounts that it made me want to close the book and most likely had it frisby across the room in frustration if it had been in paperback and not in digital form. I have nothing against the message, I think it is a solid, useful, tool for people looking to get involved with investing and saving, but when I see that you should invest $15000 a year and you're talking about wages of $100,000 a year in parts, it really hits home that I am not the target audience for this type of read. I need penny stocks and small bonds and minimal risk investments and I do not particularly see this book as much of an aid to me, personally, unless I come in to some real money sometime in the near future. This book will be suited to the wealthier beginner, though you could give it a cover-to-cover read if you are more interested in the idea than the practice of actually saving and/or investing. I was provided this book for free in return for my honest opinion and thoughts are my unbiased, sincere, own. Yours may differ,
4801708
The writing style of this textbook can be best described as oblique and vaucous. Perhaps the author's main goal was to write a textbook with as few concrete statements as possible so he does not expose himself to criticism. You will read many pages of this textbook and wonder if you have read anything substantive at all.

Sometimes, the author never bothers to explain even the most important concepts in Microeconomics. For example, the author simply states that MR=MC yet never explains why or how. I had to do my own analysis using calculus on PQ vs Q and VC vs Q graphs to make my own conclusion and understanding. But many students don't have the time, the inclination, or the knowhow to do so.

The graphs are very poorly labeled and seems out of place from the text. For example, the graph on page 225 begs a better description and label. The Y axis simply states "Cost/Unit" and I was left guessing whether that is the Average Cost or not.

The problems at the end of each chapters are good but are totally out of place with the textual explanation. The majority of the problems ask questions that the chapter had hardly, if at all, covered. You will scratch your head on many occassions trying to solve problems on concepts the chapter had hardly crossed, let alone explained in mathematical detail that the problems require.

It seems the problems were written by a different person than the author and neither bothered to check whether the problems were aligned with the concepts explained in the chapter. Moreover, there are only around 15 problems at the end of each chapter. I think most microeconomic textbooks would offer more.

It almost seems like the author did his own microeconomic analysis and figured writing this textbook was worth only X amount of his time. This textbook, in my opinion, is incomplete and half-baked and we microeconomics students deserve better.