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- Mariusz Skonieczny, author of Why Are We So Clueless about the Stock Market. What they were doing was trying to raise capital not to bring the company to profitability, but to simply grow larger so that they could raise even more capital later on. Learn how to invest your money, how to pick stocks, and how to make money in the stock market This book is filled with investment wisdom. I enjoyed hearing about the story about the early days of [.].and how they were anxious to grow it as quickly as possible without having a defined business plan.
One major investing theme in the book seems to be index funds. Of course, he also fails to mention that many funds do not invest in anything remotely associated with this large company index, so it's not fair to compare.
While the average person would be better off following this advice in lieu of uninformed, uneducated investing, it's really a lazy investor philosophy. Gold funds, small cap funds, international funds, sector funds.
If you're a somewhat experienced investor, don't waste your money. While that may be true, don't tell Bill Miller, Wally Weitz, Will Danhoff, Ron Muhlenkamp, Bruce Berkowitz.
Not to mention that while repeating over and over that the only mutual fund you need is an index fund, the Motley Fool has begun a newsletter called 'Champion Funds'- makes one think they're OK with managed funds, as long as they can get paid to tout them. While Gardner has an involving speaking presentation, there isn't much here beyond some superficial financial planning and investing advice, with a little history of the dot com bubble burst and some mea culpa on the Fool's business foibles.
He repeats over and over that 90% of managed funds do not beat the S&P index.
Also, there are some gold nuggets later in the program, so it is worth a listen if you are at any transition points in your life. Although the Motley Fools have shown their inexperience, like some of us knew they would, they have also started maturing. Much of their advice is generic enough to be good and hardly any of their advice is "bad" (like much of their competition).
They take several chapters explaining away (in hindsight) how wrong they were, but even in this light they fail to embrace proven strategies and instead go about telling you what stocks to own (Starbucks anyone.). Most major pension funds follow an indexing approach for a good reason: It works. On one hand they kind of half-heartedly recommend passive index investing and then they go about telling you about the latest stock-screening get-rich-quick fad.
I really think the best approach is to concentrate your portfolio on passive index funds compromising various asset classes (domestic, foreign, bonds, real estate) and just rebalancing once a year. For a much better read try out The Coffeehouse Investor, books by Larry Swedroe, Bogle, and William Bernstein. This is a very proven strategy that will beat virtually every actively managed portfolio/fund with far less stress (and taxes).
After owning a couple of the previous works from the Motley Fool (and subsequently throwing them out because the advice is pretty bad) I took a look at the latest edition by borrowing it from someone.First of all I've always found their advice frustrating. And oh, by the way, we still offer for sale this nifty stock investment newsletter and website for a really great price. Send these two jesters back to the circus.
Toss in a couple dubious stock picks along the way and you have nothing but a mixed message.I think this book is a pretty shallow attempt for these two to make up for the really bad advice they gave in their other books over the years. Basically this book is trying to convince you that "This time it's different." They are now trying to mend their ways and show that now their advice is worth listening to and all the stuff they said before was wrong and they're very sorry you lost so much of your money using their strategies.
Now that would be valuable information. Anybody know of someone who continued winning even during the downturn. While minimally entertaining, it has the feel of "hey we have the best hindsight of anybody." They admit they lost big time during the Market downturn. I gave them two stars because there were a couple of things said that not everybody else was saying.I'm looking for information on how to avoid or benefit from the market, without listening to all the losers.
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