Customer Reviews

The Unemotional Investor: Simple System for Beating the Market

5 star:		(26)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(10)

 

 

This book takes as it's premise that you can beat the market. Efficient Market proponents will find it hilarious.

This book is worth it's purchase price for a detailed analysis of variations on the Dogs of the Dow strategy.

The section on growth investing is to the best of my knowledge complete hogwash, data mining at it's worst. But the DOD part I think provides some reasonable investment ideas.

I had to skip the first few chapters 'cause he kept talking about his personal life and blah blah. I finally get through that and it starts off w/ Kindergarten level investing. I read through a few more chapters and then I had to let it go. Not for me but not necessarily a bad book.

If you're like me and don't have time to pore over the Wall Street Journal every morning or stay online 10 hours a day watching the stock trends, this book is for you. It gives a simple, easy to follow, and "unemotional" system for picking top performing stocks. If the market is doing well, you will too. If it isn't, he describes when to get out. I made money with this system at a time when many of my friends were losing money on their stock "hunches."

If you have any of the Motley Fools investment books, then this book is a waste of time and money. Robert Sheard, a former Motley fool employee, basically just takes the Motley Fools investment systems and puts a new cover on it, and sells it as a new book. He even re-uses the same jokes. Don't waste your money.

The hard informational content of this book could be presented on a single sheet of 8-1/2 x 11 inch paper. Then again, I'd be delighted to pay [money] for it if it showed me how to pick stocks with a 40% annual return. I don't know about you but I have hard time remaining unemotional when promised a 40% return!

Of course, the real question is: does it work? Well, I haven't risked any of my money trying it out. (Do you think I'm nuts?) But even the author admits his theory is based on only 10 years of data. Whoa! I'll be getting off the bus right here, thanks...

(For what it's worth, the author seems like a nice guy who really believes in his baby, so I take no joy in one-starring his book. I hope he gets his 40%.)

This was a book that simplified much of the theories of portfolio management, and I must say that I am pretty critical to many of the theories that are presented in this book! My opinion is that the financial markets should be evaluated more properly than what this book say! To follow these recommendations and just spend a couple of hours per year on your portfolio, and then just focus on a very few information's about the company is to put your investments in danger! However, I think that this book can help a newcomer into finance, and direct him where to start looking for potential investments.

Potential readers should be aware that the Motley Fool has discontinued its recommendation of this investment strategy because their subsequent research found that the original strategy and conclusions were faulty and flawed.

After reading numerous investment books, I consider this one a total waste of money. It consists of long chapters, with little topic division, which are a rehash of information available for free on the Motley Fool web site. It as if the author was trying hard to write enough words to make the number his publisher required to call it a book. The author should have completed his Ph.D. in English literature and continued teaching.

Nice books for a beginner investor like me. Used very simple formulas, which an ordinary people could understand. The interesting thing in the book was the transition from one approach to another, which led the reader to capture all approaches in his mind by the end of the book.

Even though Sheard did not use many technical terms, I would prefer that if the book had a glossary at the end for some financial and technical terms listed in the book.

I felt that Sheard was very optimistic about the stock market, he displayed the market as a road of roses and did not give much concern for risk analysis.

Still early to judge all his approaches, as he relied on hypothetical models and history data. The coming years will prove his methods. The FAQ at the end of the book had added value to the book.

Finally, it seems that the book was written mainly to US residents, as a reader from outside US some hidden cost had been excluded from the evaluation of the approaches, like the currency exchange rate, the cost of the investment information resources.

I recommend this book for any beginner investor.

This book is written for novice investors like myself. I still haven't tried many of the methods they talk about, but they really seem to be quite logical. All of their methods are backed by data (not as biased as one might think). Most of all, this book motivates you to get into investing on a long term scale, and tells you how to do it. Their web page combines with this book to really help you out. Good luck.