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deleteyourbroker.com: Using the Internet to Beat the Pros on Wall Street - Softcover

Byron, Christopher

 
9780684854694: deleteyourbroker.com: Using the Internet to Beat the Pros on Wall Street
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0684854694 ISBN 13: 9780684854694
Verlag: Simon & Schuster, 2002

Inhaltsangabe

Fund managers and brokerage firm traders have nothing on the savvy individual investor with a PC, Internet access -- and this book.
The Internet has leveled the investment playing field, cutting out the broker as middleman and distributing information once available only to professionals. But challenges still abound: Are there safe ways to invest in the high-tech sector? Is that "hot" IPO you just read about all it's cracked up to be? Where can you go for free, reliable financial information?
In Deleteyourbroker.com, expert stock market commentator Chris Byron demystifies online investing, pointing readers to the most valuable and reliable resources on the Internet and explaining how to use these tools to make well-informed investments. With this as a guide investors will discover:
asset allocation tools that model how much money you invest in different sectors of the market to minimize risk and maximize your returns
customized charts for any stock or index you can think of
balance sheets, earnings and cash flow statements that $1200-an-hour professionals use to analyze the market
the latest on IPOs -- if risk is your game -- from SEC filings to underwriters and more

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Christopher Byron's career in business and financial reporting spans more than thirty years, and his work has appeared in Money, The Wall Street Journal, Esquire and the Los Angeles Times, among other publications. He is currently a columnist for Bloomberg News and MSNBC.com, and is a contributing editor and financial columnist at The New York Observer. One of the best-known Web-based stock commentators today, he hosts a live daily webcast, High Noon on Wall Street with Chris Byron, and the daily syndicated radio program Wall Street Eye Opener. He lives in Weston, Connecticut.

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Chapter One: How the Internet Has Changed Investing

This is a book about investing on Wall Street. It's also about investing on the Internet and about investing in the Internet. This book won't make you rich -- at least not in the Bill Gates scheme of things -- but if you've already got a few dollars, it might help keep you from getting poor...as well as help you make your money grow. It should help you to match, or even beat, the broad market averages -- and it may even show you how to have some fun while doing so. It is written from a perspective of thirty years as a financial writer and columnist covering Wall Street, as well as, from time to time, that of an investor.

It is written in the belief that, in numerous and important ways, the advent of the Internet and its graphical offspring, the World Wide Web, have fundamentally changed the way Wall Street operates, tipping the balance of power for the first time away from professional investors and speculators, and toward everyday individuals. Almost anything -- and I mean anything -- that a professional investor, hedge fund manager, mutual fund portfolio manager, or brokerage firm desk trader can do with his $12,000-per-year stock trader's terminal and his $100,000-plus research reports, can now be done by any individual with a personal computer, a modem, and a $20-per-month connection to the Internet.

But don't quit your day job just yet, because there is a second belief that underpins this book -- namely, that no matter how much you wish it were otherwise, the odds are greatly, indeed impossibly, against your getting rich overnight and staying that way for any appreciable period of time. The structure of the market is against you, some of the cleverest card-counters on the planet are against you, the tax laws and technology are working against you, and on top of all that you've got the powerfully disruptive and unpredictable forces of human psychology working against you.

As I write these words in the spring of the year 2000, something approaching a kind of mini-panic seems to have gripped Wall Street. After years of rising stock prices -- capped by six months of an unprecedented further surge that erupted when people thought prices could absolutely, positively go no higher -- the market just as abruptly turned around and started dramatically dropping. It took nearly thirty years for the NASDAQ Composite Average to climb to the 4,000-plus level (and, briefly, 5000-plus) that the index reached by March of the year 2000. Then in scarcely a single sickening week, it lost 25 percent of those thirty years' worth of gains.

Some stocks -- particularly in the technology and so-called dot.com sectors, which people had thought could only go up -- went down so fast it became impossible to sell them. Many stocks lost 25 percent or more of their value in a single day -- not just one day, but day after day after day as the slide progressed.

On the first trading day of the year 2000, ReSourcePhoenix.com, a California-based Internet company with more than 200 employees, sold for $25 per share and was worth $280 million on Wall Street. Investors who held the shares had watched themselves grow rich beyond their dreams, and many had pledged their shares as collateral on loans to buy yet more stock, or put additions on their homes, or take vacations, or buy sports cars. You name it.

Three months later, ReSourcePhoenix.com was selling for $1.65 per share, and the whole company was worth less than $19 million on Wall Street. In other words, 93 percent of its value had been wiped out, and investors have been taken to the cleaners. By the summer of 2001, the price had dropped to a mere one cent per share.

Obviously, no one can know what the future holds. Were it otherwise, the person with that knowledge would, in the end, wind up with all the money. But we can know what happened in the past, which means that, by slow and careful navigation, we can move forward by constant reference to the rearview mirror of life. And in the end, that is all that investing in stocks is about: trying to figure out where we are headed by looking at where we have been. As we'll see later in this book, the most important single lesson history teaches us in that regard is that, over time, stock prices always rise, but that they do not rise, over the long sweep of years, at more than about 10 percent to 15 percent annually. The corollary to that fact is this: When stock prices do rise beyond the norm, the day comes when they fall more than normally, so that, in the end, the growth rate returns to the norm.

This means that the mood of seeming panic that grips the market as I write these words could vanish tomorrow, and stock prices could begin soaring all over again. But any movement of prices -- either up or down -- outside the norm will eventually be offset by a counter-balancing move in the opposite direction.

Trying to anticipate when those moves are about to occur -- in effect, to snatch the money and run -- is what market timing is all about, and the odds are greatly against getting it right.

* * *

The purpose of this book is not only to help you recognize and appreciate the difficulty of trying to time the market -- to anticipate its ups and downs -- but also to recognize other pitfalls and opportunities of the market -- and to exploit them to your benefit. Some of these opportunities and pitfalls were once limited to Wall Street professionals, but thanks to the Web are now open to everyone.

This book will actually take you into the Web itself so you can look at and understand exactly what is being discussed in the text. Throughout this book you'll find what are known as hyperlinks.

Just type these Web addresses exactly as you see them into your computer's Internet browser and you'll be transported directly to the Web site page that is being discussed in this book. Since the World Wide Web is like an enormous global library in which the librarians are constantly moving around the locations of the books and periodicals, some of these links may be out of date by the time you read this book. So just type the following: www.deleteyourbroker.com, and you'll be taken to a Web site that will list updated links for your convenience.

In this book we'll look at the risks and rewards of day trading -- an activity that basically boils down to trying to anticipate minute-to-minute moves in individual stocks on the NASDAQ electronic stock exchange. Day trading has become an extraordinarily popular pursuit among individual investors in the last couple of years, not least because of the almost deafening level of promotion that has accompanied the growth of online investing itself.

Nonetheless, one of the conceits of this book is that you can lose your pants as a day trader, and that you should stay away from the activity. For one thing, the technology of home-based Internet connections just isn't reliable enough to be dependable on a minute-to-minute basis, and in day trading, minutes (and sometimes even seconds) can mean the difference between profit and ruin. What's more, as a day trader an individual gains no advantage whatsoever against professional traders at major investment firms like Goldman Sachs, who have been doing exactly the same thing for years.

Even so, as an online investor you should at least know what day trading is all about and how it works -- if for no other reason than because you can sometimes profit greatly from the pricing distortions created in the market by the day traders. In short, you don't have to be a day trader to make money from day trading, but you do have to understand how it works and what drives it.

Thus, if you were to type the following hyperlink (known as a URL, which stands for something that we don't need to care about) into your browser --...

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Verlag
Simon & Schuster
Erscheinungsdatum
2002
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0684854694
ISBN 13 
9780684854694
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
292
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV
info@simonandschuster.nl

Herculesplein 96
Utrecht
3584 AA
Niederlande