Rule #1: The Simple Strategy for Successful Investing in Only 15 Minutes a Week!
by Phil Town

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Book Reviews of Rule #1: The Simple Strategy for Successful Investing in Only 15 Minutes a Week!

Book Review: A Lower Risk Way to Be a Momentum Investor
Summary: 4 Stars

Rule #1 as most investors know is to avoid losing money. That's because it's too hard to make up losses. So you pull out quickly before a position weakens very much according to this book . . . in fact, faster than most people do now. But it's good to have a sell discipline and most books are pretty weak on that point.

The book begins with a variation on the Benjamin Graham and Warren Buffett school of investing . . . buy $1 worth of a fine growth company for 50 cents. He urges you to buy quality companies at an attractive price based on a ten year perspective for growth in and high levels of return on invested capital, sales growth, e.p.s. expansion, and book value per share growth.

Then, he turns to a few technical rules to buy and sell positions quickly based on a combination of MACD (using a 8-17-9 test), relative stochastics (using a 14-5 test triggered at the 20th and the 80th percentiles), and stock price compared to a 10 day moving average. When all are positive, buy. When all are negative, sell.

If you don't know what those measurements are, the book will explain them for you. They sound more complicated than they are.

If you follow this approach rigidly, you should pick up on the middle part of a major up move and be out before the stock price can decline very much to eliminate your profits.

The book provides considerable detail on how to acquire these statistics for free on the Internet. And that's where I had a quibble. I tried to follow his advice for making the weighting adjustments to what MSN Money provides automatically . . . and I couldn't find a way to make the adjustments. So I'm using the standard weightings on Yahoo Finance instead. Perhaps it's that I'm not very good at following directions . . . or perhaps because I use a non-standard browser . . . but I gave up after two hours of futile efforts.

I also don't think you can really pursue this approach in 15 minutes or less a week. If you get into a volatile position during a time of market gyrations, you'll need to spend more like a half hour a day . . . unless you are only looking at one stock.

But if you had used this approach during the Tech bubble, it would have saved your bacon. That's how the author was able to keep his hands on the 7 figure value of the portfolio that he pyramided from a small initial investment in the late 1990s.

Anyone who wants to have a new approach to high return investing should definitely examine this book.

Very interesting!

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