Customer Reviews

Guerrilla Investing: Winning Strategies for Beating the Wall Street Professionals

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Siris does a good job at explaing basic investing techniques for the "little guy" but sometimes the militaristic atmosphere was a bit too much. Personally, I got quite a bit of good information from the book and enjoyed the material. I would recommend it to anyone who has an interest in learning how to use fundamenatal AND technical analysis techniques to enhance investment selections. I think most "little guys" will benefit from this book, I know I did.

His technical section opens up with very interesting and promising observations on how to read short term price and volume action. But then, it seems like he felt he had to have some kind of indicator in there so he devotes a couple of pages to MACD. This part is lame--just a single example (MSFT 1997.11-1998.02) with no recognition of whipsaw difficulties, or any question of, if this method is so good, why isn't everyone using it. That is the whole theme of the book but he doesn't apply it here.

At various other points I began to get uneasy, thinking that this guy makes a lot of bald statements of effectiveness without much more than a couple of anecdotes in favor. Most of the time he seems to make sense. But how often does he really? In the specific area where I have done some work, he leaves a lot out.

The military metaphor is window-dressing and can be ignored. For example early on, in thrall to this image, he says that in every trade there is one winner and one loser. Punchy. Direct. Simple. But in the final chapter, he admits a case where one investor should be buying and another, with a different style, should be selling the same stock at the same price at the same time. They can trade with each other and both be winners. Once again the real world refuses to be reduced to a simple "explanation".

There is good information here on the data-gathering capabilities of the Internet, and good advice on specifics. For this it's worth the money. But use his evaluation techniques as a starting point; don't adopt them blindly. And for philosophy, read something else.

This is a great book for individuals who think they are ready to break away from reliance on the big brokerage houses. Mr. Siris gives detailed advice on how to effectively use the internet to gather the "intelligence" needed to make wise decisions. The book also contains a variety of tips for both the technical and value investor. Overall, I found this book to be very enlightening.

This book adds practically nothing to the financial literature. The first part of the book is a Peter Lynch rip-off, talking about how we should only invest in things we understand, and use our knowledge of particular sectors to make money. The discussions of fundamental and technical analysis are so superficial as to be practically worthless. The author's assertion that it's easy to tell when a stock has bottomed or topped is ludicrous--if it were that easy I'd be on my yacht right now instead of writing this. The remainder of the book essentially talks about how analyst's reports are not to be trusted, which is very true but certainly not a novel concept. Readers would be far better served by buying Peter Lynch's first two books and/or the first Motley Fook book in my opinion.

The war analogy is excellent. To win the battle for investment profits you have to know yourself and know your enemy. This book shows you how the enemy thinks and moves. You can't take on the heavyweights on their turf, you have to pick your spots to attack.

The guerrilla analogy gets exceedingly tedious. And despite claims of buy-and-hold philosophy, it is very oriented toward market timing and rather frequent trading. I'll take the Motley Fool & related any day.

The author doesn't talk down to the reader. He made me realize that the average investor...I am one...has strengths that even the profesionals don't have. I really enjoyed this book and have recommended it to my friends.

Siris does not tell us a lot of new things. But he actually opens your eyes to every-day-life truths that you normally do not think about too often. You seem to know all the tricks and transactions he writes about, but he makes you think about all of them more consciously or prevent you from forgetting some of the basics altogether when trading. As a European reader I can say that not everything in this book is really useful to me - as conditions in my part of the world are somewhat different. But as I intend to do some trading in the US very soon I must say this book was very helpful. In addition to all the useful things I read about I enjoyed the "human" tone of Siris' writing, which brings a lot of color into a usually very "dry" subject.

If I came tonight to amazon, it was to look for more books from P. Siris. Unfortunately, I havent found nothing yet. But as I said, this book is great, simple in its style and breaking much of the mystery cloud that normally is contributed to finance. PS: I will be eagerly expecting the next book!

This book had no meaning. I have talked to others about this horrible piece of writting, and they all agree. Siris does not deserve to have this book published.