Online Investing: How to Find the Right Stocks at the Right Time
Authors: Jon D. Markman
Venue:  (1999)

From the Book:Let's say Aunt Midge left you a million dollars five years ago and you wanted to invest it with care. Easy: You called up some big-city money manager who handles fat accounts for a 1% fee and handed over a check. With any luck, you watched the account grow simply by walking to the mailbox once a month every three months. Now let's say you haven't got an Aunt Midge, you have only $20,000 to invest right now, and you swear you've heard your twins, Kelly and Courtney, trading differential equations in their cribs. Those girls are going to need million-dollar educations in 18 years. And it's your job to make it happen. A few years ago, the effort to put the girls through Duke, Stanford, or even Eastern Alaska State would have sent you scrambling to the bookstore for thick, boring investment tomes or to some high-pressure salesman at a brokerage. Today, you can learn - slowly, steadily - to build your stake from the comfort of you home by harnessing a rich set of software tools and financial resources on the Internet. The job isn't as easy as doing nothing - what worthwhile task ever is? But the digital age has improved and simplified few spins of the life cycle more than the task of investing. I'd argue that human relationships aren't better on the Net, and neither are sports, art, or religion. Yet finding and rapidly assimilating financial acumen is the kind of computational endeavor that is actually better accomplished on the Internet than on paper, on the telephone, or in person. Indeed, today a dedicated mom, dad, or college student hooked up to the World Wide Web by modem from the Yukon can sneak through a strange crease of time and electrons to gather just about as much timely, relevant information about public companies as any money manager in Manhattan. Fast, Tested Techniques In this book, you'll discover easy, fast, tested new ways to find, research, and track great stocks online. I have shared my methods to find the right stocks at the right time with millions of investors in the past two years via the MSN MoneyCentral personal-finance site on the Web and the cable financial-news channel CNBC. Amid the market turmoil experienced in 1998 and 1999, these methods were a relatively steady beam of light, which resulted in stock portfolios that gained steam almost every month and beat the broad market by up to eightfold. MSN MoneyCentral's main momentum portfolio, in fact, gained 139% in 1998. That included a drop of 10% in the third quarter of 1998, when the Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged 13%, and a jump of 62% in the fourth quarter, when the Dow gained only 20%. For all of 1998, the Dow was up 16% -- eight times less than our strategy. It's not hard to learn how to build great portfolios like this online. Here's how you'll do it: In Part 1, you'll learn how to use online stock-screening tools to build successful portfolios, whether you fancy yourself a momentum, growth, or value investor. In Part II, you'll learn how to find and exploit more new stock ideas by being disciplined and focused about frequently visiting and understanding a select number of online news publications. In Part III, you'll learn how to thoroughly research all of those ideas online with a plethora of fundamental and technical-analysis information and software. In Part IV, you'll learn how to use online brokers and portfolio managers to buy and track the stocks you've chosen. You'll also learn how to fit all these ideas into your lifestyle at your own pace. Whether you're a beginner or an expert, the emphasis in this book will be on showing you how to use mechanical, unemotional, thoughtful investment strategies to get better and more consistent results over time than speculative or intuitive stock-picking. You really can leverage the power of the Web to build powerful, lucrative portfolios in whatever amount of time you desire to spend - whether it's five minutes a month or five hours a day. Here's what you need to bring to use this book: an interest in meeting your financial goals by using the Web to find great stocks and mutual funds, a personal computer, a connection to the Internet, a Web browser such as Microsoft Internet Explorer 5 or Netscape Navigator 4, and a basic understanding of stocks and the stock market. To take advantage of some of my more advanced suggestions, you'll also need a spreadsheet program such as Microsoft Excel or Lotus 1-2-3. Now let's get going. The ACM Portal is published by the Association for Computing Machinery. Copyright © 2010 ACM, Inc. Terms of Usage Privacy Policy Code of Ethics Contact Us Useful downloads: Adobe Acrobat QuickTime Windows Media Player Real Player