Customer Reviews

Investing Smart: How to Pick Winning Stocks with Investor's Business Daily

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

For those who enjoy William O'Neil's newspaper INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY and his book HOW TO MAKE MONEY IN STOCKS, INVESTING SMART is a worthwhile book. In short, this volume is a clearly written, well organized introduction of how to use IBD in stock picking. My guess is that the book was written for those who do not know too much about the newspaper; frequent readers who already fully utilize IBD's wealth of information will probably not find much here. Even so, this book still might be valuable to them as a refresher course. The only gripe I had was that the book largely seemed like a watered-down version of CANSLIM, O'Neil's renowned system to finding winning stocks. Those looking for innovative approachs to using IBD's material, hence, may be disappointed. For them, this book might have value anyway as a useful supplement to one of the best stock-trading systems in existence.

Being a student of William O'Neil's CANSLIM method of stock selection I found this book tiresome to read mainly because I know the subject matter so well. Dr. Sethna was certainly long winded and rambling in his writing style and could have said what he did in a third of the space he used. If you desire to learn about William O'Neil's methods purchase his book, "How to Make Money In Stocks." Lastly, Investor's Business Daily has added many new features since Dr. Sethna wrote this book so some of the information he shares about the paper is dated.

I did not read the book but I did look it over carefully. I was hoping it would be a clear step by step guide to using IBD to apply the CANSLIM method. There is so much information in the paper that it is not easy to apply all the techniques in an efficient manner. There are almost too many choices and directions possible. This book is not a step by step guide nor is it all that clear. I did find it to be unnecessarily wordy and vague. It just seems to go over the whole paper in a long winded fashion but does not get down to the nuts and bolts of "Smart Investing" as I was hoping it would. Refer to William O'Neil's books for better guidance about how to invest. Also, if you are a subscriber, there is a large amount of useful information on the IBD website at Investors.com.

I was very excited to find a book that was going to give me more ideas on how to pick stocks using IBD. While this book did give information on IBD, it never got into anything I found helpful in really using to pick stocks. All the author did was present information I already knew by reading IBD myself. Also this was not a pure IBD product the author attempted to mix in several authors advice and techniques into this work by quoting them verbatim. The book was very dry and hard to read and I do not think beginners or veteran traders will find it helpful. It was written by a doctor, who may be a great trader, but I did not like his writing style. I would advise reading all of William O'Neal's book and stick with IBD alone to teach you. Find your stock picks in the IBD 100, you do not need this book.

I bought this book a year and a half or so ago and I think it was a bad investment. I figured this book would be a great addition to How to make money in stocks but I was wrong.

This book is basically scanned in pages of parts of the paper telling you about all the economic indicators and other items in Investor's Business Daily.

I feel this book could have been a lot better if Dhun Sethna hadn't spent most of his time talking about such a boring subject... I mean who really wants to interpret economics graphs... I know I don't. He could have discuss how to find the winners (like the title suggests) but from what I remember about this book it is just about what the paper is and all the economic indicators you can find in it. I can clearly see why William O'Neil doesn't recommend this book.

Reed Floren

If you are totally new to investing then you should start with "24 Essential Lessons to Investment Success" & "How to make Money in stocks", both by William O'Neil. If after reading those books part of the Investment Business Daily newspaper makes no sense, I recommend this book. Once you feel successful and comfortable in the stocks you pick, you would want to understand the whole picture. Though this book will confuse you in the beginning and I agree with many of the reviews, remember it is a brake down of the newpaper and how you can use each part of it to understand everything of the market and how Investment Business Daily feeds you that information. I strongly recommend it. Puts together the Big Market picture from the pages of the Investors Business Daily paper. It should glue together some loose ends.

Miguel-Bronx New York

Read a chapter before you buy this book. See if you can understand what Sethna is saying.His first sentence will suffice to show you what I'm talking about: 'Investors Business Daily is designed and structured to an expository financial newspaper whose primary purpose is to convey understanding.'What the hell is he talking about? Convey understanding OF WHAT? Why say 'designed' and 'structured' in the same phrase? Why use an unnecesary ten dollar word like 'expository'? what else is a newspaper going to use but exposition?why can't Sethna just say something like "Investor's Business Daily is designed to be brief--to cut through the mass of financial information out there to give you the essentials you need to make money in the Market." this one sentence covers the meaning of his entire first page and a half. I'm not going to copy it all for you to torture yourself with, but I assure you it's nine sentences worth of the same rambling, beat-around-the-intellectual-bush, latinate trash.Sure, if you're WILLING to concentrate hard enough you can decipher the meaning of Sethna's convoluted, bloodless, long-winded writing style--but WHY BOTHER? I found Sethna's book unnecessarily vague and difficult to read. I graduated with honors from university but I guess I'm not bright enough to read such needlessly rambling junk; I'm certainly not PATIENT enough to put up with a guy who writes a whole book without giving a damn whether or not he actually communicates anything beyond the size of his own vocabulary. Maybe you've got that kind of patience, but if there's one thing I hate, it's an intelligent guy who's a horrible unclear writer. It makes me suspect that under his mass of education, he's really a murky unclear thinker.If you want to make money, if you want a fun read, if you want to LEARN and REMEMBER what in God's name you're reading, buy and read William O'Neil's 'How to make money in the stock market' 'IBD's guide to High performance investing' and IBD's guide to the Markets'. These books are fun, they're easy to read, they explain CANSLIM clearly. These books will help you make money and they will teach you in such a way that you can pass on what you learn to those you love--so they too can tap into the great source of modern wealth that is the stock market. 'Guide to the Markets' is loaded with graphics from IBD to help you understand it better.Don't buy this book. A poorly written rag on a very important subject. Any one of IBDs regular newspapermen could have done a far better job. I wish one of them would.