Online Investing Hacks: 100 Industrial-Strength Tips & Tools
by admin on Tuesday, January 24th, 2012 | 6 Comments
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This book can pay for itself very quickly…,
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.
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|Use financial sources on the Internet,
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.
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|Excellent resource for all investors,
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.
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|Pleased Reader,
“Teach Yourself Investing Online”, by Thomas S. Gray and Claire Mencke, is the ideal book for online investors, both novices and old-timers. The information is easy to understand, easy to read, and very interactive. There are sites to visit, quizzes and worksheets to fill out, and pages and pages of screenshots and sidebars and intriguing reading. This book can be used for quick reference or for straight-forward research. Very up-to-date and needed in this fast-paced Internet world, with online catalogs and stock trading sites, this book is your manual to succeed in this day in age. The book covers such subjects as stock quotes to saving for your child’s college fund to shopping online. I was clueless and, frankly, frightened of the stock market and Internet investments before I peeked at these pages — now I’m hooked, making extra money, and learning how to budget my finances. This book is for young and old investors alike, and it’s easy to follow, with clear language and straight-forward visuals. It was obvious to me that these authors know what they’re talking about. A must! If you think you could never make it in this busy online investing economy, you need this book! If you think you know all there is to know, you need this book! Finally, I read something I needed so much!
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|Very detailed book on all aspects of online investing,
This is a very detailed book which covers all aspects on online investing. Most people can skip chapter 1 which shows basic Internet browsing and navigation. The rest of the book shows web pages you can look at. I like this book because the authors highlight and explain the different parts of each of the web pages. At 400 pages, this book is short enough so that you won’t get bored and long enough that the author just don’t explain a concept in a sentence or a paragraph. The authors give enough detail so that you can understand and profit.
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