exchange

What more could a begining investment book do than to give you the vocabulary and a working familiarity with the do's and don'ts of investing. Milton Fisher does this in a quick read book with lots of short interesting chapters. What you learn in this book will be less costly and painful than learning the same lessons from the school of hard knocks.

The book focuses on the problems that face women everyday in the workplace. Whether one is actually referring to the labor force as the workplace, or the home as the workplace is a huge part of this book. Our society accepts that women should automatically take on the responsibilities of child care and housekeeping in addition to a regular job (if they wish to even have a job on top of all these tasks). It's not easy for women, and Hesse-Biber uses several examples and hard data to back up this book.

Not only is the "average, white American supermom" discusses, but also the differences in race, class, and other factors that can influence women's place in the "working world."

The book is very useful and Hesse-Biber always takes a strong feminist perspective. One fault would probably be that she doesn't show both sides as best she could, but overall, the book is an enjoyable one.

I am a Chinese and until recently did I finish this book written 13 years ago,now in retrospect some point of this book is not seeing through enough,Daniel overestimated Japan's awesome financial power in surface,while neglected its hidden bubble economy,much of Japanese asset was built on that overexpanding bubble economy,esp. sky-rocketing high real estate price in Tokyo and other major Japanese cities. When bubble broke,Japanese myth broke in one night,its asset shrank dramatically,but anyway it's an alarming good book,helps remind us to keep vigilent at any time.

I've been following Wade Cook's strategies since 1997. The techniques work. My first trade using Wade's strategies garnered me a 350% return.Free stocks is a catchy title but offers strategies that really work. If anything now is the time to be building your portfolio and using the market swings to benefit.Don't made Wade your only source of information though and never commit more than 2%-5% of your portfolio to option trading.Other books I recommend are 9 Steps to 7 Figures by Carlson and The Mutual Fund Wealth Builder by Dick Fabian.Outside of the stock market, the 16% Solution and Cashing in on Cash Flow are outstanding reads.I also recommend Bear Market Baloney (now WSMM#3) by Wade.You can always make money in the market. During the Nasdaq meltdown from March 2000, I made an average of 50% on no load mutual stock & bond funds and up to 600% bottom fishing undervalued stocks.Try it. It works!tcdefran@webtv.net

Wall Street Money Machine Vol 5 is basically a covered call handbook. In this book, Wade Cook shows you to make the market pay for your stocks.

I have been an investor for over ten years and have a brokers license but never knew you could do this. Unfortunately, brokers are never taught these strategies, only license requirements.

I highly recommend Wall Street Money Machine Vol. 5 for anyone who wants to make some real money in the market.

In Wall Street Money Machine Vol 5-Free Stocks: How to get the market to pay for your stocks-FREE Wade Cook introduces the LOCC (Large Option Covered Call) system. This system is a machine-a machine for generating consistent cash flow in sufficient quantities to better any lifestyle. A system that literally lets you get your stocks for FREE!

There is a saying that when something sounds too good to be true it usually is right? What's the catch you may be asking yourself. Is there a catch? To be brutually honest, yes there is, but it's not what you may think it is.

There is a way to get your stocks for free, which, if you get to the bottom-line root meaning of FREE, is simply that you do not pay for your stocks yourself. We're talking about quality stocks that you get to choose! You can be as diversifiedas you want. And get this-you can pretty much start with any amount of money you have.

This is not a get rich quick plan. Nor is this some ambiguous, nebulous method that only a few people can master and use. It is also not a theory, but an in-the-trenches, workable, cash flow stock market machine. This plan takes a simple yet overlooked aspect of the stock and options markets and puts it to full use. The results are dynamic and far-reaching.

LOCC has a beginning, middle and an end. It puts the emphasis where it should be; on generating income so you can retire. Yes, huge assets are nice, but let's go for simple ways to build steady monthly income so we can do more of the simple yet wonderful things that life has to offer.

If you like the buy and hold strategy of investing, in FREE STOCKS, you will learn how to get the market to pay for your stocks in 5 to 7 months with the LOCC system.

In FREE STOCKS, you will learn:

- Option cycles and market makers
- How implied volatility affects option pricing
- Buybacks and Rolloouts
- Stock Repair Kit
- How to put volatility on your side
- Be a seller, not a buyer
- When to get your money
- Exploration of ways to increase gains and reduce taxes
- What to do if the stock dips-Make more money!

Finally, if you followed more traditional forms of investing and lost a ton of money in the stock market over the last three years, FREE STOCKS may be just what the doctor ordered to get back on track and make that money back.

During the Bear Market of the last three years, I and others used the strategies in FREE STOCKS to recover losses on deep dips. Question: How much money did you lose by not knowing these strategies? And how much money will you lose by not applying these strategies going forward?

Get the book. It's a must read!

The author book is a composite of interviews with a variety of day traders. The book follows a question and answer style of writing. Actual technics and methodologies come secondary and are replaced with interview narratives about to pattern recognition, psychology of trading, and experience. Each chapter highlights a different trader who shares their story of success or failure. Most having survived early trading mistakes and bloated egos managing to change lossing strategies into winning reactions. Most of the traders emphasis flexibility, game plans, pattern recognition, understanding the trading crowd, price and volume, risk managment, and staying ahead of the pack. The book is easy reading and selects from a select group of day trader for opinions. Most of the assumptions are contrary to the book "The Master Swing Trader: Tools and Techniques to Profit from Outstanding Short-Term Trading Opportunities". This tells me the author is interviewing the celebrities of day trading. Warning danger! If a new trader followed their trading advice it is likely they would be crushed within hours. With high speed internet connections and powerful software and computer more traders will fail quickly than any other time in history. What amazes me is that the author does not warn the reader to approach each story with a dose of healthy sceptism, as if, the hype from the interviews is necessary to encourage others to risk their assets for a chance of obtaining rankings in the gold spoon club. I think more of the questions should have focused on the consequences of failure while day trading so the reader could see how high the stakes are for these day traders. All the interviewees agreed that once trading starts there is no beginners clubs. Trading may be against some of the best day traders in the world. These traders have no reservation about their desire to win. They are willing to admit failure and quickly get out realizing they want to win over the long run. In short this is an narrative of the forces of fear and greed that drive price and volume in the stock market.

Friedfertig has put together a well-written, informative and fascinating book of the verbal accounts of many successful day traders. BUY THIS BOOK. However, let me clear this up. Several of the day traders in this book claim that market makers are 'out to get them' and make it sound like its a personal conspiracy, especially Sidikman who sounds almost paranoid-delusional about it. I am a market maker and we are so busy facilitating customer orders that half the time we are lucky to know what our positions are. So dont flatter yourselves into thinking market makers are out to get you. Furthermore, we take plenty of risks just like everyone else, and are obligated to display orders and print our tier sizes. Please get it through your paranoid heads that there is no conspiracy to 'get' day traders. I personally am pro-day trading for many different reasons.

This book is almost as interesting as the Market Wizard books. You may not be able to apply some of the technical techniques that the interviewees used anymore, but the psychological insights they give will always be applicable. If you're hooked on trader biographies and their approach to the market, as well as short-term trading, I think you'll enjoy this book. Like the Wizards books it hammers in the importance of discipline. Most of the subjects trade a little differently, but they all learned risk parameters early on. Granted, we don't know how they did outside of a bull market, but the point was that they did far better than the norm during the market of their time. And how you do in the present in relationship to the general market is what measures your performance whether you're a day trader or a mutual fund manager.

I'm more of a swing/intermediate-term trader, but I found some of the technical and psychological insights helpful in picking intraday entry/exit points.

I paid $.90 for this book used - that's right, 90 cents - and I'd have to say it's the best book bargain I've ever purchased. I had a hard time putting it down.

Nothing more than an infomercial for his business - selling software to support the methods. The "fractal" method that he presents appears to be backwards i.e. sell an up market, buy a down market. Also he discusses his trend lines by color and all of the plates are in grey scale. You can figure it out but it does take away from the desired effect.

As an avid student of Chaos Theory and Fractals, I found this book to be similar to his other one. Williams eludes to using fractals in his analysis but makes no reference to fractal dimensions, Koch curves, monsters or any of the original theories as proposed by Mandelbrot. He does present some scaling principles and their application to Elliot Waves, but this is under the assumption that the Elliot Wave is correct or that you believe in it. I do agree with some of the money flow theories Williams proposes, which is probably the most clearly explained and substantiated part of his trading theory. For a more scientific approach to fractal analysis, I recommend "Fractals and Scaling in Finance" by Mandelbrot and for software, "Fractal Finance" by Tetrahex. Both of these follow a similar system, although Fractal Finance does use a MACD which appears similar to Williams.

I have seen there are few people criticizing the use of chaos theory in this book. I have read other books on chaos, probably they are more complex, closer to the theory, but apply them to the market if you can.
This book emphasizes on knowing yourself and then the market. My experience is it took me from being not consistent winner to a profitable trader. I can also look to the market as a friendly place for the rest of my life. No more struggle, just flow.

There are two trading methods described in this book: AIM (Automatic Investment Management) and Twinvest. Long story short, AIM involves buying your favorite security on the way down and selling it on the way up. Twinvest puts a twist on dollar-cost averaging by increasing the amounts you contribute on the way down and decreasing them on the way up. Either way, it's what I call "putting good money after bad." The author even admits in the book that he has not made anywhere near $1,000,000 from the stock market.

AIM and Twinvest are intended for investors with a long-term horizon, not short-term traders. And the existence of methods such as AIM does not excuse you from carefully choosing your investment vehicles. AIM works best on volatility, but you need to choose an investment that's unlikely to plummet to zero. If you had used AIM on a typical internet stock a few years ago, for example, most of your working capital would now be history. With all the corporate scandals and market uncertainty, it's imperative to stay as diversified as you can.

The investment method in this book is sound and it works. It is truly sad that there are so many people out there who find it so easy to say it doesn't make sense or that it doesn't work when they've never tried it! Those who say that the "sell on the way up, buy on the way down" strategy doesn't work suggesting that you need to ride the peaks have never invested in the real world. Who can know with 100% accuracy when a peak has been reached and who can sell exactly when the peak is reached 100% of the time? Nobody. The strategy helps guarantee profits while providing a high level of protection against catastrophic loss. Like any intelligent investor knows, you invest for the long term not for the short term. So AIM requires patience - nothing new here. You also need to choose your stocks well but even if you don't AIM will still keep you from making a complete idiot of yourself. In my case, I chose a stock, from a solid company, which has ended up varying very little but even here AIM helped me come out ahead. If you are seeking a method which will help you invest your money with relative safety while still making money read and re-read this book and look into AIM but most importantly apply it.

Its a shame about the title, it sounds like a book you'd find
in the Supermarket right next to the TV Guide. (No offense TV guide!). But don't let the title put you off, its a very entertaining and informative book about trading.

There are alot of trading techniques around - Alexander Elder's "Elderay", William Dunningham's "One Way Formula" and so on. The technique Lichello designed is called AIM.
(Automatic Investment Management).

Despite the title of the book, AIM is not a 'get rich quick scheme', its a 'get rich slow scheme'
Its really very simple, obvious, and pure genius.
And it 'will' make you money in the long term, in a bear market, a bull market and especially in a choppy volatile market.

Basically AIM is a system that DOES NOT try to predict the future
or BUY at the TOP, and SELL at the BOTTOM. If the price goes up
relative to your original investment you sell. If it goes down, you buy. (Its tweaked with some basic arithmetic to time when
the buy and sell signals come.)

Unlike other systems, AIM doesn't require to gamble ALL of@your readies.....you only spend 'some' of your money on stocks, and keep the rest in your pocket.

If you read any other book on trading for example by Elder, Turner or Engell, you'll find in the introductory chapter, that you have to read a "library of other books" on trading. Books on the basics, books on fundamental analysis, books on technical analysis. Very dry...YADAYADAYADA.......... NO THANKS!!!!!!!!!!

Lichello's book is self contained, its a read it and do it book, and its very entertaining and FUN to read!!!! Because AIM itself is so simple, there's lots of room in the book for exmaples and stories..you'll enjoy reading it, and find yourself nodding in agreement with some of the truisms about money, work, life and investment..........

You know its only $6, do me a favour and read it! You won't be
disappointed!

John Allen Paulos (the author) is obsessed with losing money on WorldCom (WCOM) and I find it quite annoying how many times he brings that fact up. However even with WCOM being mentioned on just about every page Paulos does try to remind us of a few investing rules.

1. Averaging up is good, unless you average up after the stock is very extended
2. Falling in love with a stock, Paulos acts like he is married to WCOM.
3. Don't catch a falling knife.
4. Buying a stock because it sounds cool isn't very smart.
5. "Strong buys" aren't as important as they sound.
6. Don't fight the market. WCOM is an excellent example.

One thing I like about this book is Paulos goes in great detail into how some stock newsletter scams work, which I found very interesting. Paulos has also included a movie idea (called a treatment for those of us that are interested in the movie business) for a sports betting newsletter scammer. I found that this movie treatment helps me remember about the stock newsletters scammers.

I found Paulos to be witty, which surprised me for a mathematician.

In closing A Mathematician Plays the Stock Market is a just "ok" book and if you happen to find it in the library you might want to peruse it for awhile, however I feel it is not worthy for our bookshelves.

However you may decide for yourself,

Reed Floren

This is an excellent book on investment theory. It reviews fundamental analysis, technical analysis, option theory and many other topics. The author explains exceptionally well the Efficient Market Hypothesis and the debate surrounding it. He also introduces basic concepts of behavioral finance.
Abstract.

As a mathematician having studied the stock market, he believes the stock market is pretty efficient; and that both technical analysis and fundamental analysis do not have much predictive value.

Technical analysis according to him should be renamed trend analysis, as it consists in graphing and extrapolating current stock price trends. He covers the major strategies technical analysts use such as buying stocks when their current price breaks through its moving average, and selling them when they fall under this same moving average.

He covers fundamental analysis and their associated metrics in good details. Reading this section, you will become familiar with all the usual metrics, including P/E, PEG, P/Book value, P/Sales.

Mr. Paulos makes a case that the stock market captures the aggregate of all our psychological foibles, and goes on giving a good introduction in behavioral finance. He illustrates the common psychological flaws associated with investor behavior, including: the confirmation bias, anchoring effect, status quo bias, endowment effect, and Richard Thaler's mental accounts. He also illustrates flaws we incur when doing investment research, such as: data mining back testing, and the survivor bias. But, in aggregate these human errors partly cancel themselves out rendering the stock market pretty efficient.

The book's gem is the debate on the Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH). The fewer the investors believe in EMH, the more they will engage in technical and fundamental analysis to extract excess return above the index. These "active" investors will render the market increasingly efficient, and negate their opportunities to earn excess return. The opposite is also true. If investors believe in EMH, they will become "passive" and just buy the stock index through a Vanguard fund or an ETF. As a result, the market will not be so efficient, and the EMH will not hold up in such a situation. So if you believe in EMH, it is false. But, if you don't believe in it, it is valid.

Paulos argues that enough active investors do not believe in the EMH to render it valid. This argument is convincing when you think of the thousands of mutual funds, hedge funds, and private managers on Wall Street. Thus, there are plenty of professional active investors to render the market very efficient. But, Paulos does not deny that certain markets at certain times, temporarily ignored by Wall Street, may be less than efficient. Thus, for him the EMH debate is not just a true or false question, it is a matter of degree.

Active investors play a crucial role in making the market efficient. Paulos makes an interesting distinction between the technical analyst and fundamental analyst. He states that technical analysts are momentum investors. Thus, they cause market volatility to increase. When stock prices increase, these guys buy even more. When stock prices decrease, they sell. Thus, they accentuate the swings in stock movements. Notice that they break the rule of Buy Low Sell High. The fundamental analysts are really value investors or contrarians. They do just the opposite of the technical analysts, and cause stock price movements to moderate. Thus, the two types of analysts/investors play a different role. But, together their active analysis make the stock market very efficient. The EMH states that all information is disseminated and absorbed immediately within the investment community, and thus is fully reflected within stock prices. But, somebody has to process this information. And, that is what the technical and fundamental analysts do.

One of Paulos other big concept concerns the statistical distribution of stock price movements. According to the EMH, stock price movements are random. And, this is true as confirmed by the autocorrelation on any time series of stock prices that is typically very close to zero. If stock prices move randomly, they should assume a normal distribution. But, Paulos indicates it is not always the case. In other words, extreme events (stock crashes or booms) happen more frequently than in a normal distribution. He adds that at the tails, the price movement of stocks is better captured by the power laws. Check page 178 for a detailed explanation on power laws. This is fascinating, and it may represent an upgrade to the EMH that relies solely on the normal distribution.

Since Professor Paulos delights in paradoxes it is appropriate that a paradox lies at the heart of this very fine book. He does indeed play the stock market, but how well and using what kind of strategy? Ironically Paulos's personal tale is one of obsession and foolhardiness, of buying WCOM at 37 (yes, WCOM), of averaging down again and again and buying calls until in near final desperation our good professor finds himself contemplating with a kind of hopeless hope his WCOM calls at $20 as the stock trades at $1.13! (p. 197)

Interestingly enough, most of what mathematician Paulos writes about here is the psychology of the market and what he learned about himself psychologically as he rode the stallion down, down deep into the valley of despair. Yes, there is some interesting and instructive math included, but how refreshing it is to read a professional academic chronicle his experience while being up-front and personal about the emotional, random, and psychological traps that often guided his decisions. It takes a certain amount of confidence to write a book like this, and it helps a lot to be able to laugh at yourself.

My experience during the period beginning early in 2000 when the market began to tank was similar to Paulos's (which is one reason I found his account so riveting) except (thanking my lucky stars) I did NOT average down as he did, and I certainly did not buy calls. Instead gradually (too gradually of course) I began to take money out of the market. For those of you who lived through those days of shock and despair, Paulos's witty self-examination will be a pleasure to read.

On another level this is a book about market theory. Paulos does not believe in the Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH), which states that prices in the market accurately reflect the value of the market and that any subsequent deviation (without new information) from those prices is a random walk. His argument (a very persuasive one) is that the market is a self-referential system that depends on how the players view the market. Paradoxically, if they believe in an efficient market they will NOT try to figure out ways to take advantage of anomalies and the market will be inefficient! Conversely, if the players believe that the market is inefficient, that there is some surplus value to be gained, they will indeed look for ways to take advantage of differentials and anomalies, and presto! the market becomes efficient.

Consequently, Paulos' theory is a refinement of the EMH. He sees the market as constantly existing in a dynamic state poised between maximum efficiency and something less than that. He sees the market as a complex system subject to the laws of complexity theory, and like the weather only more so, impossible to predict much in advance.

As for technical versus fundamental analysis, Paulos appropriately hedges. Yes, the trend is your friend, but (e.g.) the full blown Elliot wave theory is "murky" while the fundamentalists suffer from possibly cooked numbers and from the information already being factored into the stock's price. One gets the sense that Paulos is once bitten, twice shy! However, I think he has gotten this exactly right, namely that only a small edge can be had through a lot of work using both approaches.

There are some interesting mathematical paradoxes presented here and some scams. Those of you who have read Paulos's previous books (e.g., Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and its Consequences, 1988; A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper, 1995, etc.) know he has a gift for making the obtuse and opaque clear, or at least intelligible, and that he can be laugh out loud funny. I thought that he was even funnier here than usual, perhaps because there is a taint of gallows humor infused throughout. For example, in reference to his love affair with WCOM, Paulos writes, "Investing in it had originally seemed like a no-brainer. The realization that doing so had indeed been a no-brainer was glacially slow in arriving." (p. 199)

One paradox is the familiar "All Cretans are liars" upon which Paulos plays a few variations to demonstrate the self-referential aspect which is at the heart of the paradox. Included is this illumination: "The Prosecutor booms, 'You must answer Yes or No. Will your next word be No?'" (p. 187)

One scam is the familiar Ponzi scheme. Paulos thinks of a stock market bubble (as we experienced in the nineties) as a Ponzi scheme in which dot com buyers are hoping to sell to stupider dot com buyers, etc. In another context, Paulos notes perspicaciously, "Even ravaging of the environment may be seen as a kind of global Ponzi scheme, the early 'investors' doing well, later ones less well, until a catastrophe wipes out all gains." (p. 94)

I must warn the reader to beware of many atrocious puns. In one of the "worst," Paulos is explaining the emotional differences between risk adverse people and their opposite and how a stock's beta may be personalized. "A zero beta person would have to be unconscious, perhaps from ingesting too many beta-blockers." (p. 162)

Ouch!

How do you rate a book that has some excellent advice, but 90% of the text is redundant filler? I chose three stars because even one good idea is worth a few hours of your time. I think I would have enjoyed the audio CD more because it's probably more condensed.

The book warns of many financial obstacles, but has little in the way of strategies to avoid them.

Here. . . I'll save you some time:

The stock market is going to crash around 2016 because of a law called ERISA, so prepare yourself accordingly.

You can make money in up and down markets if you know what to do.

Don't trust your money to mutual fund managers.

Buy, hold, and diversify is not the great strategy you think it is.

Educate yourself financially, but if you don't, stick with buy, hold, and diversify.

Real estate is a better investment for many because you can control it more readily.

There. . . now you don't have to read the book. That'll be twelve dollars.

I did not expect to get much out of this book. I expected the usual litany of admonitions and suggestions available in hundreds of articles and basic books on finance for the masses. Despite that low expectation, the first chapter had me hooked.

With an aging population, turmoil in the stock markets, and lack of knowledge about how much money is needed for retirement, author Robert Kiyosaki gives specifics to support his theory about predictable problems facing those who hope to retire.

The book won't appeal to people who are satisfied with their current job and have no plans to change in the future. But for those who care about government policy and how these policies and demographics are impacting our society, the book is eye-opening as well as easy-to read.

The "rich dad, poor dad" vehicle gets old but is stiff an effective and sometimes entertaining vehicle for conveying information.

If you take a look at the date when this books was released and then go back and check the stock market, you'll find that everything Rich Dad predicted is in fact coming true.

What is really scary is that Rich Dad predicted this years ago!

I highly recommend this book along with Rich Dad's Guide to Investing for anyone who wants to become a successful investor.

If you want to continue to loose money and get broker, then listen to your broker. That is why they are called "brokers" Listen to them and you'll become "broker."

The scientific method seems to be main message of the book. If you can't quantify it don't trade it. At least that's the theory. In reality the book gives us a tour of every wrinkle in Victor Niederhoffer's bellybutton. His childhood in Brighton Beach, his misfortunes at playing squash and at Harvard, his would be academic career, how he got Soros to mistrust him, and finally his own hedge fund before it went belly-up the scientific way. All stories seem to have the same message: VN is the greatest person in the universe (second only to his dad) and were it not for other people's stupidity (the meme!) he'd be on top of the world. Give me a break.

If you are looking for great insight or help on trading or investing, you won't find it in The Education of Speculator. It is an entertaining book, but definitely not educational. Victor Niederhoffer provides his history plus the history of his family interwoven with a few bits of market strategy and techniques. If you enjoy reading about what life experiences compels a man to speculate in the markets, read his book. If you want to learn to speculate, don't with his book.

Victor Niederhoffer is one of the true originals in the investment world. Born to a poor Jewish family in Brooklyn, he became world champion of the ultra-WASP game of squash and then, as an academic, he challenged the prevailing "random walk" theory in papers that are still widely cited as classics. He is in the thick of the debates among today's statistical stars. Not content to stay in the ivory tower, he raised his first trading stake from the mergers-and-acquisitions business he founded, which was the first to concentrate on selling small businesses --and went on to achieve the best record of any hedge fund, in all periods.

Here's a guy who has a lot to tell about trading, business and life, and the style to tell it well. Education of a Speculator gives the reader a unique combination of quantitative sophistication, street wisdom and a scholarly grasp of market history. The bibliography alone is worth the price of the book. EdSpec is so rich that you come back to it again and again. There is simply no book like this one. I've looked.

If you want to know how the market really works, read Education of a Speculator. If you want to read about a real man, Vic's father Artie -- scholar, athlete, cop, loving father -- read Education of a Speculator. If you want to know how a great mind approaches the day-to-day fray of trading, read Education of a Speculator. Anybody who feels nothing on reading Niederhoffer's rags-to-riches story, who thinks it's nothing but egomania, doesn't have a heart.