Buy or borrow this book! Support your local independent bookseller
Find it in a WorldCat library
Compare prices at major online bookstores
|
|
What do the weather, television, fads, presidents, and advertising have to do with buying and selling stocks? This book explores all five factors and how to make money from them.
The author, a Worth magazine columnist, flies through his subjects with brio. He extracts patterns of company and market performance from weather-related events, illustrating with stock plays from Chiqita bananas to Toro snowthrowers. From 1992 to 1994, the author practiced his own principles of weather-based investing, proving that the household thermometer can be a savvy guide to the performance of air conditioning, utility, beverage, and food processing stocks, better than any ordinary market barometers.
This unconventional approach sets the tone for the rest of the book. In another chapter, the author discusses what investment opportunities might have been spotted when the FCC handed down the prime-time access rule in 1971, dictating that TV stations provide more locally originated programming. As a result, he documents, you could have made money with stocks of TV station groups such as Metromedia, or lost money with programmers such as Filmways.
There are some drawn-out, albeit clever, discussions with perky lessons, such as, "Two people can often conspire to invest in something that neither one would have invested in by themselves." Another refreshing perspective from Niederman is on the subject of long-term investing. He enumerates the psychological barriers that keep investors from taking short-term profits, "because we confuse the willingness to wait with the requirement that we must wait." This discussion is in the context of fad stocks, which investors can study (if not actually risk money on) in order to develop a discipline for selling. It's the inability to sell that convinces many people they are long-term investors.
If you had read Neiderman on fad investing you probably would have gotten into Netscape or some other Internet stock even after they had been bid up unrealistically--and you'd know when to get out profitably, too. The book is not perfect. Some of his cases are too recent to have neat conclusions. And some of these approaches, coming from a polymath with glib analytical skills, should probably not be tried at home. That said, the book is quite a refreshing change from your father's stockpicking book.
Michael Pellecchia writes about business and finance books each month. He can be reached at michael_pellecchia@bookpage.com.
©1996, ProMotion, inc.