Online Investing Hacks: 100 Industrial-Strength Tips & Tools [Paperback]

Bonnie Biafore (Author)

Book Description

Series: Hacks | Publication Date: June 24, 2004

For the geek who's an investor, and the investor who's a geek, we present Online Investing Hacks, 100 industrial-strength, bleeding edge tips, tools and techniques for analyzing and managing online portfolios.

Individual investors have become more computer-literate and technology-dependent than ever before. Whether you're looking for suitable investments, studying alternatives, or managing your portfolios, you need data. The Internet can be a goldmine of financial data and research, but today's online investors also use spreadsheets, databases, and financial applications to select, study and manage investments. If your proficiency has grown to the point where you crave industrial-strength tips and tools to turbo-charge your efforts, this is the book for you.

Online Investing Hacks covers:

• Screening Investments
• Collecting Data
• Fundamental Analysis
• Technical Analysis
• Executing Trades
• Investing in Mutual Funds
• Portfolio Management
• Updating Stock Data
• Financial Planning

Other books for managing online investing are either out of date, are for beginners and don't go beyond the most basic advice, or are so dull and boring they squeeze that last bit of fun out of the topic. Online Investing Hacks is for the customer who wants to know the latest techniques, to go beyond the basics, who gets jazzed by cool online tools and services, and who actually wants to have a bit of fun while trying to strike it rich (or at least not lose their shirt).

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

After spending 10 years as a project manager and tech writer for Electronic Data Systems, McDonnell Douglas, and others, Bonnie Biafore became a full-time financial-software writer in 1997. She's a columnist for both Quicken.com and Better Investing magazine and the author of The Complete Idiot's Guide to Online Personal Finance.

Product Details

• Paperback: 512 pages
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media (June 24, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0596006772
• ISBN-13: 978-0596006778
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #855,014 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Bonnie Biafore has always been a zealous organizer, whether setting up software demos, cooking gourmet meals, or scheduling a vacation to test the waters of spontaneity. Ironically, fate, not planning, turned this obsession into a career as a project manager. When she isn't managing projects for clients, Bonnie writes about project management, personal finance, investing, and technology. As an engineer, she's fascinated by how things work and how to make things work better. She has a knack for mincing dry subjects like accounting and finance into easy to understand morsels and then spices them to perfection with her warped sense of humor.

Bonnie is the author of QuickBooks 2012: The Missing Manual, Personal Investing: The Missing Manual, Project 2010: The Missing Manual, Successful Project Management, Your Project Management Coach, the Better Investing Stock Selection Handbook, Online Investing Hacks, and many other books.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

35 of 36 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This book can pay for itself very quickly..., November 20, 2004

By 

Thomas Duff "Duffbert" (Portland, OR United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Online Investing Hacks: 100 Industrial-Strength Tips & Tools (Paperback)

Online Investing Hacks by Bonnie Biafore (O'Reilly) is one of those books that can pay for itself in short order, as well as over and over.

Chapter list: Screening Investments; Hacking Excel for Financial Analysis; Collecting Financial Data; Analyzing Company Fundamentals; Technical Analysis; Executing Trades; Investing in Mutual Funds; Managing Your Portfolio; Financial Planning; Index

I worked at Enron from 1998 through 2001, and spent plenty of time during that dot.com era following my stock portfolio. I watched my Enron stock value go from incredible value to a point where it cost more to sell the stock than it was worth. I won a few bets (face it, that's what they were) on a few dot.coms and lost many more. What could have been an incredible nest egg, isn't. This book would have been a lifesaver if I had read and paid attention to it a few years ago. Biafore shows you how you can analyze and invest wisely using a variety of tools available to everyone.

If you're an Excel user, you'll find it an invaluable tool for analysis. She'll show you how you can use it to create financial charts (#13), calculate compound annual rates of growth (#26), and use rational values to buy and sell wisely (#36). #39 - Spot Hanky Panky with Cash Flow Analysis (using Enron as an example) would have literally saved me hundreds of thousands of dollars had I known about it. Even if you don't care about the investing tips, the hack on downloading data via Excel web queries (#7) was something I didn't know how to do (or that you could even do it!). The book has a little something for everyone.

As with all Hacks titles, you probably won't be interested in every single item. Some may not be applicable to your situation or may be too complex for what you care to handle. But all it would take is one hack to work out and change your investing for this book to pay huge dividends. If you do your own investing, you owe it to yourself to get this book.

23 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Use financial sources on the Internet, July 18, 2004

By 

W Boudville (Terra, Sol 3) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Online Investing Hacks: 100 Industrial-Strength Tips & Tools (Paperback)

Barely 12 years ago, before the Web, there was very little on the Internet for the investor. And what there was cost money to access. Here, Biafore gives a good current survey of how there has been a vast systemic change.

The bulk of her book consists of methods ("hacks") of getting financial data from the Internet. Mostly free access, note. But the book is far more than just a list of good financial websites. For that, you can go to magazines like Forbes, Fortune, Business Week and Kiplinger's, which regularly publish such lists. Remember that this is an O'Reilly book, and the publisher's readers are often programmers.

Thus, many methods involve downloading data into an Excel spreadsheet that has logic to analyse it using meaningful financial formulas or metrics. Of course, given such a spreadsheet, you can add further logic of your own, to winnow down a list of stocks. If you are already a programmer, then from that standpoint, there is nothing hard in the book. You may not perhaps be as conversant with some of the financial jargon. But part of the book's job is to educate you on that.

The thrust of the book is to let you, the investor, take a maximal and active advantage of the best financial resources on the Internet.

22 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent resource for all investors, October 3, 2004

By 

ueberhund "ueberhund" (Salt Lake City, UT United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Online Investing Hacks: 100 Industrial-Strength Tips & Tools (Paperback)

It seems like everyone is involved in investing in some form or another. While I always felt like I should be investing too, it was never clear to me how to begin this process. After all, it's my money. How can I be sure I'm investing in something that will provide some sort of reasonable return? This book is an excellent resource in answering some of those questions and putting the new investor on the right track.

This book is written in the same format as the other "hacks" series by O'Reilly. This format is very easy to read, and the format makes it very easy to find answers. Rather then having to read the book from cover to cover, the reader can pick out topics they are dealing with, read the answer, and move on. Since many of the people interesting in a book of this nature will likely have little time, the book's format works to its advantage.

The book begins with some basic introduction to the stock market and tips for selecting appropriate stocks or mutual funds. The whole middle section of the book deals with data analysis. The author discusses how to understand a company's balance sheet (e.g. what that P/E ratio means), how to spot companies in financial trouble, how to pick a good stock, and even how to trade. There is also a good discussion on minimizing the effect of taxes on your little return on investment.

The author even goes further and gets into a discussion on financial planning. In addition to discussing debt reduction, the author also talks about IRA plans and different strategies for saving for your child's education expenses. I think my favorite part of this book was the discussion on different education savings plans. The author discusses the ins and outs (as well as tax consequences) of each of the plans, and provides some examples illustrating the fact that it's better to start saving earlier than later.

This is an excellent book, not just for its investing advice, but also for its sound financial planning. This is a great book for anyone who is interested in increasing their wealth, saving for a rainy day, or simply saving for future financial goals.