[.ca] Investing Without Fear: Protect Your Wealth in all ... (ISBN 0471698644)

1 star is too generous:
By way of explanation, I read an excerpt from this book in a popular tout sheet and bought it merely to pad my order to get to the free shipping level. What a mistake. (The lesson here is to just pay your shipping charge and be done with it). My own personal view of the equity markets is one of a longer term secular bear market and I_ve been trading options for a number of years so I should be sympathetic to Weiss_ thesis. However, all of Weiss_ insight in this area is summarized in 15 rules covering 4-1/2 pages. While mostly accurate, there are some glaring errors, e.g. Rules 3 and 4 advising you to avoid contracts of a certain price range. Option prices are based on the cost of the underlying shares so to avoid contracts over $500 is to limit yourself from companies with high share prices with potentially the most room to fall. Perhaps I was expecting him to elaborate on some other bear option strategies, but all he offers is buying puts. As for directly short-selling (the only other way to benefit from _crash_ markets) all he says is _don_t do it_. He fails to sufficiently describe the time decay problem with long options in his 15 rules. E.g. with respect to the interminable Japanese bear market, simply long puts may not have made you any money because of the graceful but inexorable decline punctuated with sharp rallies. You would have needed a bear-neutral strategy. The problem is that with a preponderance of contracts at a certain strike, the market makers may ride the underlying shares past the expiry so that they all close worthless. The rest of the book recounts recent financial scandals such as the $6k shower curtain, but I found myself skipping over several chapters at a time because I_m one of those odd people who remembers what they read in the paper or saw in the news. There were some odd chapters on real estate and moving your money to a safe bank, which suddenly struck me as the same stuff Prof. Ravi Batra was writing in the 80_s (to wit _The Great Recession of the 90_s_!). To his credit, Batra caught the _Great Recession_ of 1991 (as did your local evening news) but by 1992, the stuff was all nonsense. Could anyone benefit from this book? Those interested in the subject would probably already be in the bear camp, but the book is insufficient as an introduction to options trading so there is little practical value. And those unfamiliar with his filler material probably don_t read the newspaper, so why would they read a book? For any practical benefit, this book should have been published 3 years ago. So perhaps publication now is actually a contrarian indicator? BTW some of the rave reviews are just bizarre, one guy recommending "9 Free Secrets of New Sensual Power" in the same breath. I can_t comment on that selection, but if you_re trying to pad your order to get free shipping, that is probably a better choice.

Crash Profits:
Truly a worthless book written by someone who has little insight into how the capital markets really work. Comments on high yield bond and guidance about which stock in your portfolio to sell demonstrated that the author is devoid to any true investment knowledge. My credentials to make the judgments: Certified Financial Planner, MBA Degree, fee based financial advisor.

Quality Economic Commentary, But....:
Weiss has a newsletter service, so he naturally will not write a book that would make someone a stand-alone investor. Still, this book is practically essential economic reading considering the media (CNBC, Wall Street Journal, etc) cannot tell the truth about how weak the American economy is in 2003 without losing most of their advertisers. Weiss is thorough and utterly convincing in laying out his case. Writing it in novel form will take a very small of adjustment for the reader. This book should be part of an investment library including Charles Caes ("Tools of the Bear"), which explains options and esp. PUT options to profit from the market's future slide down. .....Also Sy Harding's "Riding the Bear" (general market knowledge and history) and John Murphy's "Charting Made Easy" (helps one learn technical analyis) should be used. I have, they helped to 250% gains in 2002. Anyone under 50 is NOT going to get ANY Social Security.

Nutty Nineties Explained:
I have spent literally thousands of hours over the last several years attempting to understand the nutty nineties stock market bubble, excess credit creation, global economic conditions, Federal Reserve policy implications, deflation/inflation, Austrian School of Economics and investment strategies in a post bubble world. I have no doubt that Dr. Weiss's book would have drastically shortened my learning curve! Most financial publications are written in academic or industry lingo making them hard to digest for a novice, and just plain difficult to read. Dr. Weiss presents the clearest most simple explanation for many facets of our previous stock market boom and the potential aftermath of these excesses, while most other books over complicate the subject. Dr. Weiss combines fictional tales with facts to weave a boom and bust tapestry that all but the blind can see. I thought so highly of this book, I purchased extra copies for family friends who are complete novices, as a way of introducing them into our current investment climate. I do not necessarily agree with all of Dr. Weiss's positions, I strongly recommend this easy to read and comprehend book for the novice and market maven alike.

Misleading title, but story interesting in the beginning:
The title of the book is probably the most misleading one I have come across for a while, as it has nothing to do with the books contents. The cover would have you think this is a book about how to make money and give you the strategies promised on the back cover. It isn't. It is a storyline about a CEO and some friends who get caught up in some financial tricks and end up blowing the whistle in a financial thinktank called CECAR. It is designed to be a lesson in macro and micro economics. The problem is that the story is interesting at the start, but drags on and on with the unplausible existence of the thinktank (as no-one would fund such a thing) that grows in size, profile and importance to the point where there is a meeting with the US President. Get the drift ? I read all but the last 40 or so pages. My recommendation is not to buy this unless you want a few pages of an interesting story on how financial cover-ups can work.