I am usually not crazy about books that propound a simple way to beat the market. This is one of those books. What makes me willing to write a review about this book, is that the writer, Charles Kirkpatrick is willing to incorporate some fundamental measures into his analyses, notably price-to-sales, which will help with industrial companies, but not with financials.
This is a simple book that reinforces the idea that one needs to pay attention to valuation (in a rudimentary way), and also to momentum. While I don’t endorse the specific methods of the book, I will say that for someone with a low amount of time, and wanting to do a little better than the market averages, he could do so over the intermediate-term with the methods in the book.
Note: I am not endorsing the technical methods in the book, but most of the methods boil down to momentum, anyway.
If you want, you can find it here: Beat the Market: Invest by Knowing What Stocks to Buy and What Stocks to Sell
PS — Remember, I don’t have a tip jar, but I do do book reviews. If you enter Amazon through a link on my site and buy things from them, I get a small commission, and you don’t pay anything extra. I’m not out to sell things to you, so much as provide a service. Not all books are good, and not every book is right for everyone, and I try to make that clear, rather than only giving positive book reviews on new books. I review old books that have dropped of the radar as well, like this one, because they are often more valuable than what you can find on the shelves at your local bookstore.
David:
How can advocate people using these models which clearly don’t work? Estimating volatility is a suckers bet. Even if you could estimate the underlying “actual” volatility with 100% accuracy there would be sample error in your realized volatility. And of course the volatility isn’t just changing, the fundamentals of the underlying are changing.
I once heard of a man named Mandelbrot who said volatility was infinite, in which case these sigmas and lemmas are a bit beside the point, no?