Customer Reviews

Stock Market Rules: 70 of the Most Widely Held Investment Axioms Explained, Examined and Exposed

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According to the dust jacket, the author earns his living as an investment adviser. One can only marvel at the generosity of his clients in retaining him if this book is anything to go by.

Mr Sheimo affects to "explain" and "examine" some investment notions, and to "expose" the ones he finds contentious. In order to do any of these things, it would help if he were actually to trouble to acquaint himself with what these "axioms" are in the first place. All too often he merely displays his own ignorance by getting them not only comprehensively wrong, but wrong in such a form as to constitute a schoolboy howler.

I take just one example as representative of Mr Sheimo's cluelessness: chapter 65, which attempts to debunk the "random walk hypothesis". The author considers that he has accomplished this task by setting a chart of numbers generated randomly in a lottery draw against a chart of the Dow Jones price index, over two years. And, duh, they look different. It beggars belief that a professional investment adviser should be in business at all let alone could have written stuff like that without first having worked out what variable it is that the hypothesis posits as random. It isn't *prices* that are hypothesised to follow a random walk, but price *changes*. If Mr Sheimo goes back to his database and tries this exercise again, but does it properly this time, I suspect he will see immediately why his published work has - to coin the euphemism to end all euphemisms - somewhat missed the point of the exercise. Having started with a howler of monumental proportions, the author then goes on to a series of misconceptions buttressed by non sequiturs. The most egregious of the lot is his misconception that in an efficient stock market the past doesn't predict the future. Wrong yet again: to the contrary, in an efficient stock market, where all publicly available information is already discounted in market prices, today's price is the best possible predictor of tomorrow's price. It's today's price *change* that has no implications for tomorrow's price *change* - thereby rendering the disciplines of technical analysis and stock market forecasting a damaging irrelevance at best.

It would be difficult to do justice to the sheer awfulness and ignorance of this book in a single review. But the effect after a while is just tedium rather than the majesty that you sometimes get from reading something that is unspeakably bad. Don't bother buying it, in any event.

For the least, Mr. Sheimo's writing style is boring and inconclusive. Many times he tries to make a point but is poorly supported. Many are hindsights, few are based on in-depth analysis. However, it does cover a big spectrum of so called 'rules'. Readers are advised that nothing new will be learned, no teaching of 'how-to' but tons of if, but and may be....

This book is useful for people just starting out in the field of investing, however doesn't go into any specific detail of each of the axioms. Some of the axioms are Biased and dont fully examine the creditabilty of the stratagy. Bottom line: If you've been investing for over a year this book will prove useless and won't help you in your investing careers. Try another book!

Stock Market Rules (second edition) is a good basic book on stock investing, it is interesting to read and explains many well-known stock trading axioms. Old sayings like: "Sell the losers and let the winners run, Never short the trend, Buy when there's blood in the streets," are explained and examined. Although many of these sayings may be true, some have changed (such as; "Buy on Monday, Sell on Friday"). The book's approach is very helpful to me as a beginning investor, but it should also be useful and interesting to the experienced investor who wants to learn more about the stock market. The chapters are short and to the point, with excellent charts and clear examples. I recommend it to anyone interested in stock investing.

If you are just starting out as a trader, I think this book is incredibly helpful. Beginners with no experience will find the 70 rules to be very insightful. It will answer a lot of questions about why a stock moves up or down on a given day and give you valuable tips on when to get in and when to get out. It's easy reading and you can apply the knowledge immediately. You can always check this out from your local library to see if you like it first. The library has tons of trading books, for free!