The Neatest Little Guide to Stock Market Investing (RevisedEdition) - Softcover

Kelly, Jason

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0452284732 ISBN 13: 9780452284739

Publisher: Plume, 2003

Synopsis

Thoroughly revised for the new year, an insightful and informative guide for beginning investors provides detailed advice on how to make wise stock selections, decodes difficult expressions and terms used on the stock markets, and more, to alleviate the tension of making the right investments. Original.

About this title

About the Author

Jason Kelly is the author of the bestselling Neatest Little Guide series

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Foreword: This Book Always Works

The advice in this book works. It keeps you out of dangerous stocks and shows you how to find good stocks that make money over time.

I wrote the first edition in 1996 and 1997, just before the market began its steep ascent into the bubble of the century. Back then, Enron and WorldCom were talked about as must-own companies and the internet was expected to put so-called old economy companies like Wal-Mart out of business. Who would walk the aisles of a store when they could shop online in their pajamas?

Plenty of us, evidently. In the five years following this book's first publication to its update in fall 2002, Wal-Mart stock rose 181 percent while most internet startups disappeared and Enron and WorldCom declared bankruptcy. On November 29, 2002 Wal-Mart racked up $1.43 billion in sales -- on that day alone. The two leading internet merchants at that time, Amazon.com and eBay, had annual sales of only $3.62 billion and $1.02 billion respectively.

This book would have kept you out of Enron, WorldCom, and the dot com disasters. It would not have kept you out of the market's volatility, and no approach to stocks will. The market is volatile in the short term and rises over the long term. Almost all attempts to get around that basic profile involve a lot of work for nothing.

So what kind of experience should you hope for in the stock market? One like you would have had from Anheuser-Busch. I use the world's largest brewer to explain sales and price-to-sales in Chapter 7 and pointed out in the first edition that its stock was selling at a price cheaper than Coca-Cola's. Anheuser-Busch sold for $19.91 at the end of November 1997. In November 2002, more than two-and-a-half years into the bear market, it sold for $53.70, a five-year gain of 170 percent. The company's annual sales grew from $10 billion in 1995 to $13 billion in 2002, when it said in November that it was having an "excellent" year and that it expected its strong earnings growth to continue.

You want companies like Wal-Mart and Anheuser-Busch working for your money. This book shows you how to find them. Its methods win in flat markets, rising markets, and falling markets because superior companies always come out on top.

Invest in them and you'll come out on top, too.

Edition details

• Publisher: Plume
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0452284732
• ISBN 13: 9780452284739
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288