Customer Reviews

Beardstown Ladies' Common-sense Investment Guide - How We Beat The Stock Market - And How You Can Too

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The folksy advice sounds too good to be true--and it is. How couldn't someone--anyone--have seen that the so-called "returns" on investment are rigged? The media waited too long to expose the fact that the authors included club fees in figuring how they supposedly "beat the market." In fact, the market beat THEM. Don't waste your time or money.

Ok, the ladies did get people interested in investing, but they really screwed up in the end. I can't believe that they still do speaking engagements about investing--to me, they're the Milli Vanillies of the investment world!

News reports are now saying that the Beardstown Ladies club annual investment returns were under 10%, rather than over 20%, because of a mistaken calculation. Whopping blunders are not the way to inspire confidence in their advice.

While the falsity of the Beardstown Ladies' 23.4% annual return has been well-publicized, there are other, less-noticed clues in the book that the authors simpply can't do math. There is a reference to an 88% over 16 months, or "66% annualized." But an 88% return in 16 months corresponds to 61% annually. Worse, they report a 72% loss on a stock over 2.5 years, or a 29% annual loss. But 72% over 2.5 years annualizes to 40%. This is high school math. Furthermore, their claim to be fundamental analysts is deceptive. They define fundamental analysis largely as looking up stock price statistics in ValueLine.

Don't bother with this one...strip away the arterey clogging recipes and you've got at most 100 pages of blather written by a ghost writer who knows nothing of investing. Also as is old news by now, this group massively underperformed the market.

If you are planning to read this book to learn about some "Beardstown Ladies magical formula to beating stock market", then forget it. This book is not for you.

"The Beardstown Ladies Common-Sense Investment Guide" is a self-glorifying book by the "Beardstown Ladies", about the "Beardstown Ladies". In brief, this book is all about how some small town ladies got lucky in the stock market.

In no way can this book be considered a "Investment Guide". Most of the ideas presented in this book are self evident and already known to the general public. There are no specifics on how much they made but based on some of the numbers quoted, it does not look like they made millions or anything close to it. Again the pompous ladies have quoted just the beginning and ending numbers, so it might seem that they got good overall returns, but if you try to find the compounded rate of returns, it turns out to be mere few points above or close to the market and that too over a not so long period.

The book just talks about its so called "great" successes. But fails to tell any of their failures.

This book should probably have been renamed as "Beardstown Ladies book of recipes".

All you can take from this book is ... If some small town ladies can make "some" money in the market, you too can :-)

-Sachin

I don't see anybody mentioning the recently revealed 'mistake' in Beardstown Ladies calculations. Their REAL annualized yield was not 23+ % but a much more modest 9 %. You could be better off with an S&P index fund

While mutual-fund managers (who manage other people's money) are forced to disclose their actual returns with periodic audits from established accounting firms, "investment advisors" are free to make up numbers to sell their advice. The implicit message behind every investment book (Buffett, Lynch, et al) is the unspoken promise: "If you think about investment as I do, you, too can earn my spectacular returns."

Buffett and Lynch earned the right to toot their own horn -- having beaten the general index over decades. The Beardstown Ladies' dirty little secret is that they "accidently" included their monthly dues into their total returns of their fund. If a mutual fund manager did this with his 12b-1s he'd be in jail. Skip the book and go for Peter Lynch.

They didn't beat the stock market. . . the stock market beat them

The increase in their returns was calculated including the club members' monthly dues (as stated on the book's ISBN page), thus vastly overstating their performance.