- The Weekly Market Power Gauge
- Demystifying the Process of Investing...
Demystifying the Process of Investing...
If you are reading this book, there is a good chance that you at least occasionally tune in to those television programs on CNBC, Bloomberg, or elsewhere that feature up-to-the-minute stock market reports, intermixed with streams of market experts—with sometimes up to four or even six heads at a time, and usually with a bullish bias—who agree or disagree regarding prospects for the stock market, near and long term.
Given the constraints of television time, experts are provided with one or perhaps a few minutes to succinctly stake out their positions. For the most part, Wall Street pundits tend to be optimistic—particularly corporate representatives, who, naturally, have their own stakes in expressing optimism regarding their own industries or companies, or executives of mutual funds, who are most unlikely to advise investors to bail out of the stock market.
Still, you might wonder—with all those computers available, with all those financial and technical wizards in-house, and with all that research data at hand—why so few market forecasts are in agreement, and to the extent that they are, it is usually to the effect that what has been happening in the marketplace is what will continue to happen.
Perhaps there are too many experts, too much information, too many indicators—much of which is contradictory—and too much implied need to predict what may happen in the future rather than to simply respond to what is taking place in the present. You will be learning just a few indicators: tools and techniques by which you can track the stock market—not by forecasting weeks, months, or years ahead, but simply by being able to recognize when it is time to hop aboard the train, as well as recognizing when it is time to exit the party.
The tools that you will learn are the basic tools that I employ to manage my own and my clients’ money.
Money is serious business. Other people’s money is even more serious. If you know your clients personally, the way my company tries to know its clients, you know the importance of accumulating for the time when you can no longer work, you understand the seriousness of late-life illness when cash on hand is insufficient for medical expenses, and you learn the impact of inflation on lifetime nest eggs.
I, my son, and our staff take investing very seriously. I have personally spent a good part of my lifetime studying, researching, and testing methods by which investment results may be improved. You will be learning strategies by which large amounts of actual clients’ money—and my own—are being invested.
This is not a large book. I have written it to be a serious book.
I promised a brief but useful work.
Let’s cut to the chase.
Gerald Appel