Customer Reviews

The Unemotional Investor: Simple System for Beating the Market (Motley Fool Books)

5 star:		(24)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(10)

 

 

Nice books for a beginner investor like me. Used very simple formulas, which an ordinary people could understand. The interesting thing in the book was the transition from one approach to another, which led the reader to capture all approaches in his mind by the end of the book.

Even though Sheard did not use many technical terms, I would prefer that if the book had a glossary at the end for some financial and technical terms listed in the book.

I felt that Sheard was very optimistic about the stock market, he displayed the market as a road of roses and did not give much concern for risk analysis.

Still early to judge all his approaches, as he relied on hypothetical models and history data. The coming years will prove his methods. The FAQ at the end of the book had added value to the book.

Finally, it seems that the book was written mainly to US residents, as a reader from outside US some hidden cost had been excluded from the evaluation of the approaches, like the currency exchange rate, the cost of the investment information resources.

I recommend this book for any beginner investor.

Potential readers should be aware that the Motley Fool has discontinued its recommendation of this investment strategy because their subsequent research found that the original strategy and conclusions were faulty and flawed.

If you have any of the Motley Fools investment books, then this book is a waste of time and money. Robert Sheard, a former Motley fool employee, basically just takes the Motley Fools investment systems and puts a new cover on it, and sells it as a new book. He even re-uses the same jokes. Don't waste your money.

The fundamental problem of this highly simplistic and simple-minded work is that the author utilized back-tested methods to supposedly demonstrate how easy it is to make above average returns in the stock market.

This approach, ironically, is central to that used by so many investment newsletters which Mr. Sheard and his brethren have been so vocal in criticizing.

The author's lack of background in the investment field and credentials should also be a huge red warning flag to neophytes likely to blindly follow his suggestions.

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This is clearly a bull-market product enabling author Robert Sheard to really rake it in at at time when virtually every man, woman and child in the country wants to be an investor.

Sheard's "Unemotional Growth" and "Investing for Growth" portfolios are products of the current bull-market too. Back-testing to 1987 isn't good enough because the intervening period hasn't even seen a bear-cub, much less a grizzly like the one that prowled Wall Street during the mid-70's. In any case, the whole exercise is based on data gleaned from "Investor's Business Daily", which itself is a product of the current bull-market! Need we say more?!

As for the "Unemotional Value" portfolios, they are based on the well-known "Beating The Dow" portfolios, first publicized in 1992 by O'Higgins, and so that is nothing new. Of course, Sheard has a lot of variants on the BTD portfolio, like UV2, UV4, "juiced" UV4, Foolish Four etc. However, these appear to be more an outcome of extensive data-mining rather than the result of any reasoned, logical and analytical approach. It only goes to prove that statistics are like prisoners -- if you torture them enough, they will confess to anything!

All in all, this is certainly NOT a book worth buying. However, if you do intend to read it, I suggest that you just borrow it from the public library, as I did.

Overall, I liked this book, but I thought that the review of the dogs of the dow theory was a little long and overdone. Parts of the book that I would recommend is the author's approach to Growth investing through using Valueline and Investor's Business Daily rankings. I found this to be an interesting use of both of these types of rankings. I also enjoyed the mathmatical formulations that the author provides at the end of the book to find out how your investments actually perform over the long term.

However, beware that this book really does not add much to the pot in the world of investing. Most of the material found in the book, can also be found at the Motley Fool website for free.

I really enjoyed the book. I think it does a great job in teaching the Foolish Four/Dogs of the Dow/Unemotional Value approaches to investing. All the stuff I've read in the Gardner Brothers' books were reiterated and as a result are permanently embedded in my future investment strategies. The more aggressive Unemotional Growth strategy is a bit too scary for me. A third of the book focusses on this. I don't want to maintain a portfolio with that kind of activity. Maybe the book should have included coupons for free sample issues of Value Line and Investors Business Daily. The final chapter Frequently Asked Questions was excellent.

If you know nothing about investing (I do not mean saving), and you want to be a self-proclaimed investment genius, then buy this book and join the masses of savers-turned-speculators who have only recently discovered stocks during the waning months and years of the greatest stock market mania in the history of capitalism.

However, if you are a savvy "investor", this book is good for a laugh, as are the scores of other get-rich-with-stocks-and-retire-early tracts, which years from now will be scoffed out by baby boomers sitting in CDs after having lost half their life's savings or more in the next Great Bear Market.

This book is written for novice investors like myself. I still haven't tried many of the methods they talk about, but they really seem to be quite logical. All of their methods are backed by data (not as biased as one might think). Most of all, this book motivates you to get into investing on a long term scale, and tells you how to do it. Their web page combines with this book to really help you out. Good luck.

First, this is an extremely well written introduction to value and growth oriented investing in stocks, especially for the beginner.

Just a warning to Motley Fool regulars... While this book is a clear summary of the Foolish Four and Workshop areas of their site, I did not get any information from this book not available on the web site. In fact, certain strategies in the book have been improved upon since the book went to press.