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The Motley Fool Investment Guide : How The Fool Beats Wall Streets Wise Men And How You Can Too (Paperback)
by David Gardner, Thomas Gardner
| Category:
Personal finance, Personal wealth, Investment, Self help |
| Market price: ¥ 168.00
MSL price:
¥ 148.00
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| Stock:
Pre-order item, lead time 3-7 weeks upon payment [ COD term does not apply to pre-order items ] |
MSL rating:
 Good for Gifts |
| MSL Pointer Review:
A solid and fun to investing, this book stands out as a good primer for beginners. |
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Author: David Gardner, Thomas Gardner
Publisher: Fireside; Rev Exp edition
Pub. in: January, 2001
ISBN: 0743201736
Pages: 316
Measurements: 8.4 x 5.4 x 0.8 inches
Origin of product: USA
Order code: BA00562
Other information: ISBN-13: 978-0743201735
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- Awards & Credential -
Great starting point for investing. One of the Top 100 Personal Finance titles on Amazon.com. |
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- MSL Picks -
This gem of a book will give you all you need to know about investing that would take over a year to learn in college/graduate courses. It also shows you that the beauty of our system is that individuals have the power in their hands to educate themselves and do at least as well if not better than the high paid Wall Street gurus. I always thought this kind of stock analysis was beyond me, but their step by step explanations make learning almost fun. Plus, you'll learn how Wall Street guys make all their money ripping people like us off (okay, I'm sure there are some honest blokes out there... ). The point is, we are all capable if we invest a small amount of time. The writing is breezy and easy to follow (with lots of good humor packed in) and the subject matter endlessly fascinating. The appendices give you all the "idiots" stuff that you think you know but probably don't - a kind of A-Z of stocks. It will also motivate readers to go online and find lots of this information. Highly recommended.
(From quoting M. Bayliss, USA)
Target readers:
Beginners to investing.
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David Gardner and Tom Gardner are cofounders of The Motley Fool, Inc., an Alexandria, Virginia-based multimedia company dedicated to empowering individuals to take control of their financial destinies. The Motley Fool Investment Guide is the second in the Gardners' trilogy of personal finance and investing books, which includes the bestsellers The Motley Fool You Have More Than You Think and The Motley Fool Rule Breakers, Rule Makers.
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From Publisher
For Making Sense of Investing Today... the Fully Revised and Expanded Edition of the Bestselling The Motley Fool Investment Guide.
Today, with the Internet, anyone can be an informed investor. Once you learn to tune out the hype and focus on meaningful factors, you can beat the Street.
The Motley Fool Investment Guide, completely revised and updated with clear and witty explanations, deciphers all the new information - from evaluating individual stocks to creating a diverse investment portfolio.
David and Tom Gardner have investing ideas for you - no matter how much time or money you have. This new edition of The Motley Fool Investment Guide is built for today's investor, sophisticate and novice alike, with updated information on:
- Finding high-growth stocks that will beat the market over the long term
- Identifying volatile young companies that traditional valuation measures may miss
- Using Fool.com and the Internet to locate great sources of useful information
Since going on-line in August 1994 with their sassy and savvy Web site, The Motley Fool, the Gardner brothers have been helping the on-line investor crush the market averages by dozens of percentage points. Now, in The Motley Fool Investment Guide, they show readers‹from novice investors to experts‹how to take full control of their investing futures and make sure they have fun doing it.
Avoiding the obscure jargon so treasured by Wall Street's best and brightest. the Gardners explain financial concepts and the tools for sound investing in plain, clear English. Their market-beating strategies bristle with winning approaches, including the cherished Fool principle that the biggest risk to investors often is not taking enough risk.
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Chapter One: "Fool"?
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Take heed... The wise may be instructed by a fool...
You know how by the advice and counsel and prediction
of fools, many kings, princes, states, and commonwealths
have been preserved, several battles gained, and divers
doubts of a most perplexed intricacy resolved.
- Rabelais
Fool?
Not a very wise choice for a name when you're trying to ply your trade in the investment world. For decades financial professionals have done their best to sell customers on their Wisdom. Whether it's the pinstripe suit, the avuncular smile, the firm handshake, or the advertising jingle ("Rock Solid, Market Wise" comes to mind), your typical broker, money manager, or financial planner has striven for an image that smacks of success, intelligence, experience, respectability - in a word, Wisdom.
And for years they've all been making a fair amount of money off fools. You know about fools. You may even have been one yourself at some point. Ever listened to a salesman on the other end of a phone long enough that the voice-activated vacuum cleaner he was trying to sell you began to make sense? You were being foolish. Ever bought a stock on your dentist's recommendation without even looking to see if it was listed? How very foolish of you. Or what about when you snapped up shares of International Dashed Hopes Load Fund just because your broker said it was the top performer in its category last year? Terribly, terribly foolish.
Basking in the excesses brought about by this folly, the financial establishment hadn't banked on one thing - that one day the tables might turn when some Fools (and that's a capital F, maestro) actually showed up.
The Wise would have you believe that "a Fool and his money are soon parted." But in a world where more than 80 percent of all professional mutual fund managers lose to the market averages, year in and year out, how Wise should one aspire to be? In what other realms could such a compelling paradox exist, that the paid professional can do no better than - in fact, cannot even do as well as - dumb luck? And this general ineptitude has been made more ironic by the appurtenances that typically attend the Wise: expensive suits and gold cuff links (to impress their clients), Swiss watches (to convey the importance of their time), mahogany desks (to rest at between rounds of golf), and other similar displays designed to impress and intimidate their customers. Ah, the many-splendored totems of those who were paid too much to make too little.
In fact, we got to thinking after a while that we should just go ahead and call ourselves Fools, since our attitudes and approach to life were so radically different from what was being passed off as Wisdom all around us. So we launched our original Motley Fool, taking the name from a nondescript quotation from Shakespeare's As You Like It: "A fool, a fool! I met a fool i' the forest, a motley fool." We'd always loved Shakespeare's Fools... they amused as they instructed, and were the only members of society who could tell the truth to the king or queen without having their heads lopped off. The Motley Fool began as a monthly newsletter, then transformed into a daily feature on a national online service, then became one of the premier financial destinations on the World Wide Web. And among other things, of course, it is also a series of books (of which this is the second, following The Motley Fool You Have More Than You Think), all containing as much Foolishness as we can pack into them.
Our goal was and is very simple: Beat the market and show others how to do it - the more novice, the better. In our brief Foolish history, we've enabled thousands of average people who didn't previously know a dividend from a divining rod to invest their own money without the help of Armani suits, and crush Wall Street at its own game.
Our approach is best characterized by its hostility to conventional wisdom. For example, the Wise will tell you just to invest your money in loaded mutual funds. (This "double dip" enables them to charge you for that advice and then charge you on an annual basis for the funds' management fees.) We, on the other hand, are telling you to buy stocks. They'll tell you, "All right, take on the risk of buying stocks. But if you're going to do that, just buy the safest ones and hold on." Or alternatively, some brokers will try to sell you a variety of rinky-dink shares of penny stocks, dubious entities with an even more dubious likelihood of ever paying off. We say poppycock, in both cases. We're telling you to sprinkle some more volatile growth stocks in with your blue-chips to improve your returns. And avoid penny stocks altogether! We're also educating you - horror of horrors - about shorting stocks, a devilishly fun attempt to profit off the decline of a stock, rather than its rise. To the Wise, there is no more risky, bad-faith investment decision than shorting stocks. To us, if you're an advanced investor for whom the stock market is more than a passing fancy, we believe you should at least consider the potential advantages of shorting. And the outrageous list goes on. It is topped off by the very idea that you would even manage your own money yourself. To many segments of the financial services industry today, and portions of the press, this idea remains well-nigh taboo.
In what follows, we therefore hope to teach you, to amuse you, and ultimately to make you good money at the same time.
But first we should introduce ourselves.
Who We Are, by Way of Explaining
What This Book Ain't Going to Do
We're David and Tom Gardner, brothers, and the original editors of The Motley Fool. We hope that you have already gotten to know us through our first book in The Motley Fool trilogy, The Motley Fool You Have More Than You Think, but in case you haven't, let's mention again how we started. Yep, we originally began investing simply because, upon turning eighteen, we took over stock portfolios that our parents had started for us at our birth.
It takes some casual investors a lifetime to wean themselves off the numbing teat of mutual funds; we never knew the temptation. Our very first purchase was shares in a trucker called Leaseway Transportation (since acquired by a larger company). One hot summer we watched it go from $26 to $42, where we took our profit. The stock had been culled, using a few elementary measures, from the pages of Value Line, that redoubtable seven-inch-thick investment research monstrosity that we rarely use anymore because online resources are so much more powerful and timely. We cannot remember the exact rationale for the purchase of Leaseway, so it can't be listed among our most inspired investments. There is an enduring lesson here, however. If you're willing to take a risk and you're open to continuous learning about the world around you, you can succeed wonderfully in the stock market without paying the Wise for the privilege.
In this book we're going to break down into their primary components the reams of writing that we offer on a daily basis in cyberspace. The idea, as the Man says, is not just to hand you a Twinkie... rather, we're going to teach you how to locate your own Twinkies, so that you'll learn to feed yourself for years and years...prior to dying of a massive heart attack.
We want to help you help yourself make money. This was our intention back in 1993, when we launched The Motley Fool as an investment newsletter. Ye Olde Printed Foole - as we fondly refer to it - contained our stock picks, one monthly investment article, and a patchwork quilt of content in keeping with our motley interests. We mailed out unsolicited copies to a few thousand unsuspecting people and wound up our first month with exactly thirty-eight subscribers. Did the world care this little about getting educated about the stock market? We were depressed.
What we needed was visibility. So we decided to start a conversation about stocks on what at that point was a small but fast-growing national online service - America Online.
Through the power and beauty of el cheapo modems, we connected to America Online over local phone lines and started typing. We offered our investment opinions and advice in response to requests from complete strangers, doing our best to provide them with as much information about their own holdings as they could handle. In so doing, we discovered some wonderful things (like how many people were willing to volunteer their own investment research for the benefit of many) and some bad things too (see Appendix D, "Zeigletics"). But what we mainly did was acquire new subscribers. Within a few months, our little gabfest had grown into the most popular financial discussion on America Online. The company approached us about opening up an actual business on its service, where we could get paid for doing interactively, on a daily basis, many of the same things we were doing just once a month, noninteractively, with Ye Olde Printed Foole. Even better.
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| View all 7 comments |
Library Journal (MSL quote), USA
<2007-09-15 00:00>
The Gardner brothers, cofounders of Fool.com, present two parts of their trilogy (third title, The Motley Fool's Rule Breakers, Rule Makers), which update original material with the latest trends in finance and investment. Throughout the briskly paced, crisp narration, their trademark focus remains on novice investors with minimal information about investments but who are ready to invest their precious capital. In Investment Guide, the Fools decipher how to evaluate individual stocks, create a diverse investment portfolio, and find high-growth stocks that will beat the market over the long run. Their explanation on how to pick that first stock, how to read various company financial reports, how to select large and small cap firms to invest in, and how to distinguish "Rule Breaker" from "Rule Maker" firms is tailored to the very patient individual investor wired to the Internet. In You Have More Than You Think, the duo focus on taking control of personal finances, the first and most important step toward successful investing and a secure future. For folks trying to balance lifestyle aspirations with financial realities, while serious about getting out of debt and into the stock market, their advice regarding financial security is solid. While very little here is radically new, with the resounding success of The Motley Fool, the Gardners' major web site, and their importance in the world of finance and investing, these hip titles are certainties for all public libraries. |
ReedFloren.com (MSL quote), USA
<2007-09-15 00:00>
This book is pretty good for first time or novice investors, the Gardner brothers discuss the advantages and disadvantages of different investment methods most notably: mutual funds, index funds, and stocks. Also it seems these Fools (yes they like to be called that) like investing in Dow stock, much of their information regarding Dow stocks appears to come from Michael O'Higgins author of Beating the Dow. Another method that the brothers introduce is one of their own for picking out small cap growth stocks, here's what they look for:
Sales of less than $200 million
Daily Dollar Volume of $3 million or less
Low Price $5-$20
Net profit margin of 10% or more
Relative Strength (IBD) of 90 or higher
Earnings and sales growth for the most recent quarter of 25+ or more
Insider holdings of 15%+
Cash flow from operations should also be a positive number
This book is primarily aimed at beginning investors who want to hold growth stocks for a year or more, however a lot of this book is focused on them talking about their website www.fool.com
My favorite part of this book would have to be the chapter on Zeigletics: The Penny Stock That Never Was. |
A reader (MSL quote), USA
<2007-09-15 00:00>
The Motley Fool Investment guide by the Gardners was a fairly interesting primer on the subject of investing, with a particular emphasis on stockpicking. However, that is ALL you should take it as. It should merely be viewed as ONE type of overview of the stock market that may or may not be valid under current market conditions.
Note: Beginning investors should be very wary of following the strategies outlined in this or ANY investing book with any significant sum of money. Run a simulation portfolio and test out the validity of these methods before you plunk your hard earned cash into some particular system. Be warned. My opinions may sound very negative and you may be at a loss of confidence, but I do believe you'd rather take a beating in your emotions before you take one with your portfolio.
Now, overall, the book offers some nice stratagems for newer investors and is written in a very friendly style to keep people interested. The book is laced with the Gardners' personal style of humor(which I wasn't particularly fond of), but they did manage to keep the book fairly light-hearted and easy to read. With that said, I believe a key flaw of this book is that it makes achieving market-beating returns seem fairly easy.
Would it be feasible to believe that anyone could suddenly start playing NBA quality basketball were that person to read and follow some simple exercises in a book entitled "Play Basketball like Michael Jordan"? How about "Tiger Woods in 20 Minutes"? Yes my friends, it is very possible to play pro ball by doing my secret exercises for only 20 minutes a day, because in my new book, I have outlined some very secret and powerful methods that will make your growth in talent and muscle EXPLODE! *cue slightly altered techniques found in a basic exercise manual wrapped around in clever and seductive writing.
The notion that someone can play professional, all-star level ball by reading a book and following simple exercises would quickly be dismissed as utter BS. But in the world of investing, 'secret methods,' 'the methods of the pros,' etc. etc., always seem to entice new investors into buying a $15 manual to learn the secrets to beat the market. Maybe Peter Lynch can get by on beating the pros by looking at investments only a few hours a week because his decisions are built on experience... It may be easy for a professional bodybuilder to lift 350 lbs, but does that mean the average man can expect to do the same? To suggest that the newcomer can beat the pros by spending only a few hours a week and using a very simple system sounds quite like the 'pro ball' scenario, no?
You certainly won't get consistent market beating returns by following the very scanty guidelines offered in this book. Another area of fault with the book is that, at times, it seems like you've just spent your hard-earned money on a big advertisement. The constant plugging of their website is extremely annoying to say the least. It almost seems as this book was geared to get you to join their website.
With all of that said, the book offers a decent, easily followed write-up of long term investing fundamentals. It's a nice overview of the subject of investing, and beginners will learn some good lessons, but by no means should they believe that by reading a couple of investing books and following the simple guidelines within should they expect to beat the market over the long-term. There's a reason most mutual funds don't consistently beat the market over the long-term. And no, it's not because the majority of mutual funds are run by complete dunces (some of you may tend to disagree). The objective of obtaining market beating returns isn't nearly as easy as it seems. |
Chris Forest (MSL quote), USA
<2007-09-15 00:00>
Dave and Tom have created an immensely readable and informative book for the average Joe who wants to learn how to invest in the stock market. Their liberal use of humorous examples makes the book hard to put down. They explain why mutual funds are usually a bad choice, how to do your own research, how to avoid sky-high commissions, how to do your own research on companies, the difference between fundamental analysis and technical analysis (and which one is basically worthless), and even how to make money in a bear market (yes, it can be done, and it's a lot easier than you might think). Overall, if you are looking for a simple and fun explanation of how to get started in investing, you can't possibly go wrong with this one. |
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