Customer Reviews

Power Investing With Sector Funds: Mutual Fund Timing and Allocation Strategies

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I received this book for Christmas, 1999. I read it at the time and thought, "What a great concept!". Had I written this review at that time, I would probably would have rated it **** or *****. At that time Mr. Madlem's web site, which is cited throughout the book, was mostly "Under Construction"; there are numerous references to this site in the book and fully implementing the strategy is very time consuming and cumbersome without it. Because of this, I decided to hold off for awhile.

I recently dusted off the book and read it again, fully intending to implement the process Mr Madlem touts. This time I found that his web site no longer exists, period. I also found that a "read through" of the book is good from a "concepts" perspective, but when one starts to actually implement the strategy, this book is incomplete and filled with many contradictions, inaccuracies, and inconsistencies. This is especially true as related to the numerous charts and Mr. Madlem's accompanying explanations.

After looking for other sources of information on "Point and Figure" charting, I found a lot of good, accurate information in other places on the web. I simply did a web search on "Point and Figure". I know now that very little in Mr. Madlem's book is original; he borrowed virtually all the concepts and techniques from other sources. This book is, as they say in Texas, "All Hat and No Cattle".

The "Point and Figure" charting method has a lot going for it; just don't rely on Mr. Madlem's book as its bible.

I bought this book in August 1999. I read it for many times and tried to invest with its "great concept", but I failed. I tried to get some help from the Author's web site, but it was constantly "Under Construction" and finally disappeared. Then I got some help from Mr. Thomas J. Dorsey's company. Mr. Dorsey is the Author of a famous book Point & Figure Charting. His web site did use the same idea as Mr. Madlem's for mutual funds. However, this did not help me to implement the "great concept" either. At that time, Japanese funds were the best funds, but I was instructed not to invest in that fund, because it was overbought from the point & figure charting. I waited almost half a year and bought Fidelity Japan Small Cap Funds. However, the bad time for Japanese funds just started, thus I lost a lot of money. According to the methods of this book, I chose several technology funds to invest at the beginning of 2000. As everybody knows we had a huge correction that year, the results I had were just loss of money.

This book applies "Point and Figure" charting to mutual funds. I think it might be correct. However, there is a large space for discussion for the ideas such as the portfolio management presented in this book. This is because when you want to actually implement them, there are lot of difficulties and conflicts.

If you want to get information for mutual fund timing and allocation strategies, I think this book can only give you bad results. The author said in his book that this book is from his experience, but now I doubt.

Lots of examples of P&F charting but I found the information and examples hard to follow. I lost interest in the middle of all the examples. I might be able to use it as reference, but it was just too hard to follow and read to the end.

I found the book very interesting and I am certainly going to follow up on Mr. Madlem's strategy. However, trying to use his web site is not possible because most areas are under construction including the opportunity to subscribe to his website which is supposed to allow one to follow along with the strategy first hand. There is a portfolio of his current positions available at the web site.

Presents a very interesting and useful approach to portfolio allocation and a fund selection/rotation strategy based on relative strength performance. At first the emphasis on point and figure charting did not interest me, but after studying the techniques, I found a few very helpful ideas for estimating price objectives, etc.

For the active fund trader, the concepts presented will stimulate ideas for system development and money management/allocation approaches.

Mr. Madlem provides a simple and common-sense approach to investing in mutual funds. The reader who is motivated enough to read and understand the concepts presented here and utilize them in his own portfolio will be taking a big step in improving his investment results.