Growth-fund

Financial Independence The Smart Way shows you how to become your own investment manager. If you're looking for advice and an action plan to help you secure your financial freedom, look no further. I found this investment book to be the best I've seen. The author takes a disciplined, systematic approach to investing, guiding you from your personal objectives to suitable investments for your portfolio. It has helped me to sort through the maze of current offerings and develop a well-designed plan for investing. The book shows how to "invest the smart way" and what it takes to be a successful investor. The author explains why its risky to be out of the market. I liked the strategies he offered to become my own investment manager, to plan for a financially secure retirement, to invest online and to protect my capital.

The author has assembled all the information that a first-time chairperson of an outdoor festival would need to be successful. The author has run outdoor festivals for twenty years. He has done every aspect of a festival from starting and running a successful, fundraising festival as a volunteer to providing food, games, rides, merchandise, tents, and beverages for profit. He brings all these years of experience to this 87 page manual that has charts, diagrams, illustrations, and several chapters that are written by guest writers that themselves have led successful fundraisers. The book covers every topic that will make your event a winner: volunteers, meetings, insurance, layout, entertainment, food, beverages, crowd control, money control, and many more. This is truly a book that contains everything needed to start your festival and successfully keep it going.

This small book is a plea for a long term corporate strategy against the actual short term vision of the business officers, who are hounded by financial analysts only interested by short-term capital gains.
The task force gives some excellent recommendations, although it admits that it will be difficult to change the actual mentality.

The report also contains a very good analysis of the state of the US economy and of the real challenges: sluggish productivity, decline in real wages for four-fifths of American workers, poverty, unequal income distribution, deteriorating savings, poor education.

It reminds us of Pigou's fundamental analysis of the irrationality of the human behavior: 'human society tends to place too high a discount rate on everything, due to an irrational impatience, a foolish desire for pleasure now relative to the future.' (p. 97)

A small but important book and a must read for every economist.

John Train's slim book The Craft of Investing has a title that might mislead some readers into thinking that it is another one of his well-crafted overviews on investing. A good portion of the text, however, deals with topics that are probably most relevant to high networth individuals, family wealth management professionals and private bankers. Other investors will find chapters such as "Family Capital," "The [Trust] Executor's Job," and "How to Use a Safe-Deposit Box" less than relevant.

There are passages that are of interest to a wider audience. The first portion of the book is a brief, but useful survey of different investment styles. Other passages provide an interesting distillation of Train's tips on what makes a good investor, for instance, his advice about reverse engineering the trades of well-regarded institutional investors ("start by piggybacking on the thinking of the best professionals"); keeping a conservative approach to investing (which he says favors " sober, seasoned, careful older people"), and honing of investment skills to a professional level. "Most points are lost on errors, rather than by forcing shots. Since the investor never has to act, he should focus on not making avoidable mistakes." There is not enough meat on the bone here, though, to rank this book as one of Train's better ones. Instead, readers new to his work are better off starting with The Money Masters and The New Money Masters, two books that rank among the best in the investment field.

Overall this is a great investment book. It covers an extremely broad range of topics and for the most part the reader cannot go too far wrong following the author's advice. The sections on the nature of markets and his advice on commodities alone makes the book worthwhile. Bear in mind that the book was published in 1994 but most of the content is timeless. Another book with much of the same advice is The Only Investment Guide You'll Ever Need by Andrew Tobias. One additional thing- some of the charts and tables and examples date from the 1970's and are evidently from magazine articles that the author wrote. Just so you know what you are buying. The example are good ones and mostly remain relevant today. The only real limitation of the book is Train's simplistic approach to growth stock picking.

It is impossible to praise this book enough. I have been actively investing for greater than 10 years, and I have read more books than I care to count. You will feel much more confident in your investing and making choices. I finally have a good grip on why do stocks go up and down. But you get insight into other matters as well ,and get to feel the wisdom of a true master,in a well written easy style. Just what we need during this deflating bubble we are in now.

A senior sales executive once said to me, "Steve, you sales trainers are all alike. You take 6 hours to make a 30 second point." Unfortunately this is true of Boylan's book. The point he does make is his idea of creating 'leverage' by contacting your prospective buyer and at the same time contacting his boss, and his boss's boss - along with other 'leverage points.' While I agree that most sales people need to earn contact at higher levels in organizations, this isn't the way. It is the kind of technique that leads to the bad image most people have of sales people.

This book was written for those who have serious problems with gaining access to others of special importance to them. Boylan offers a cohesive and comprehensive system to overcome all manner of barriers. He calls it The Circle of Leverage™ and explains it within six different sections entitled:

What's Been Keeping You Out

The Circle of Leverage™ System: What It Is, What's Behind It, and How It Works

The Circle of of Leverage™ System: The Ten Preparation Steps

Making Your Move: The Five Execution Steps of the Circle of Leverage™ System

Advanced Moves

Mastering the Circle of Leverage™ System

Obviously, this book can be very helpful to those in sales but if we expand our perspective to include other forms of persuasion, this book offers even greater value. For example, consider the potential relevance of the Circle of Leverage™ System to recruiting and hiring, M&A initiatives, competing with others in the same organization for its resources, use of customers as an extended sales force, use of "alumni" to locate talent, etc.

The Circle of Leverage™ System is sound. Boylan's explanation of it is thorough and lucid. I recommend this book highly to anyone who is both willing and able to make a sustained commitment to applying these principles. What else will you need? Tenacity and patience.

I am a VP Sales for a technology firm and I only recently read this book. I was so impressed with the innovative material I flew to MN to meet the author! Despite what the negative reviewers have said, this book is NOT a sales manual. It IS a manual for obtaining access. It is an excellent precursor to an existing sales process, but the sales process already needs to be in place. The author uses the term "bolt-on" addition which is a very good visual depiction of how this tool should be used.

Any good executive can tell you how difficult it is to be seen at the appropriate levels. More and more, callers and visitors are sloughed off to the next lower level, and if the caller doesn't have a compelling reason to stay at the executive level, they will invariably continue to be pushed down lower and lower until they are speaking with the lowliest of the non-decision makers, a "recommender." Horrors!

Don't sell this book short. "Getting In" is a master treatise on how to develop and keep access at the C-level. I highly recommend it.

I'm kind of scratching my head here, wondering if I read the same book as all the five star reviewers. I wanted a bit more of a discussion on risk, I wanted more on how the money he runs has been performing, and a bit more rigor on the decisions as to choose stocks.

However, I did like the opening chapter, and the discussion on convertible bonds for high-tech companies, even though both could have done with a little more "meat" also.

Good for the novice, but anyone with a bit more experience will be frustrated.

Some explanation about high tech sectors. Then some fundementals used to evaluate companys. This book is a waste of time and money. Dont buy it because of its attractive title.

I've been working in computer R&D since the late 60's. I was jealous of friends who paid for their Silicon Valley houses using investments in Hi-Tech. The field just seemed too confusing and too volatile. Now it's like the gold rush of 1849 and even crazier. I found Murphy after a search of Amazon.com and what a great book! He explains the industry and it all fit together with what I knew from experience. A subscription to Murphy's California Technology Stock Letter resulted in a 97.9% increase in my portfolio for 1999 with half of it invested in index stocks. Note that none of the Hi-Tech picks were in internet stocks. (Murphy performs detailed fundamental analysis and believes in value. Only recently has he added any internet stocks.) Note that he concentrates on the Western USA since he insists on face to face discussions with the CEO before making a recommendation. Some complain that Murphy doesn't understand biotech - well his biotech picks are hot now. Others say look at his mutual funds - a fair complaint in 1998 but 1999 his technology fund was up 97%. So if you want to understand the Hi-Tech and Bio-Tech industries you have to read Murphy.