Product Description
The most important edge you can develop in becoming a smart investor is knowing how to spot an emerging trend before the pundits are advertising it and everyone jumps on board. As global investment specialist and popular AOL Finance Editor and Money Coach Hilary Kramer knows, picking the stocks that are hot today doesn’t give you that edge — it just makes you part of the pack. Instead you need to learn how to get ahead of the curve, discovering the trends that will lead you to the best up-and-coming companies well before others are on to them. You don’t need elaborate calculations or a degree in finance to discover great investment opportunities. As Kramer reveals in this fascinating and indispensable book, the clues are all around you, hiding in plain sight — you just have to learn the secrets of spotting them as you go about your everyday life.
Offering a wealth of specific examples from her own wildly successful investing career, Kramer divulges the remarkably effective techniques she uses to spot trends: nine powerful yet simple methods for discovering trend indicators all around you. Who would have thought that, in the days of the Atkins diet anti-carb craze, a company called Panera Bread — now a booming chain — would be a great investment? Hilary Kramer knew it would be. How did she know, way ahead of the crowd, that Embraer, an aircraft manufacturer located in Brazil, of all places, was becoming a market leader and had great growth potential? She knew how to spot the trend. As she shows, if you follow her simple methods, you, too, will be able to:
• Identify reliable market trends early• Spot other, secondary, trends that will be sparked by more obvious trends
• Discover the clues in everyday life that will lead you to great growth companies
• Evaluate which companies among the competition are the best investments
• Recognize when a trend is peaking and it’s time to sell
Armed with her time-tested techniques, your own eyes and ears become your most reliable and powerful resources for market-beating wealth creation, not only today but for the rest of your life.
Ahead of the Curve: Nine Simple Ways to Create Wealth by Spotting Stock Trends
21 Jul
11:10 am on July 21st, 2010
This book reads as if someone looked over the past few years of stock prices, picked a few stocks that went up significantly in price, then made up stories to explain why she invested in them. The endless tales of stock market success could not possibly be true. Well, they might be, but there would have to be an almost equal supply of purchases that did not fare so well. Nobody could have the batting average this woman implies.
Basically, she explains, over and over again, how she caught wind of a trend (brilliantly ignoring all the fads and looking only at real trends), found a stock that could profit from the trend, bought it low, then sold it high. Presto! Easy as that. She even demonstrates a worksheet that takes us into her thought process. She writes “lower interest rates,” then makes deductions from there on the impacts to various industries, such as housing and mortgage finance companies and makers of home fixtures. Incredibly, her ability to predict what stocks will benefit from low interest rates includes companies that sell all manner of home renovation equipment, but she presciently manages to exclude the giant home reno stores like Home Depot and Lowe’s (which of course have not performed well over the past few years).
There is simply no way anyone could have made as many brilliant forecasts as this woman claims (at least not without making a commensurate number of not-so-brilliant forecasts). While her concept of looking for trends and trying to logically deduce the extent of the trend and any secondary and tertiary effects is a great idea, all the difficulties inherent in doing such analysis is completely ignored.
Rating: 1 / 5
12:20 pm on July 21st, 2010
Ahead of the Curve is geared towards novice retail investors. It is about finding great investment ideas by making simple observations in the news and every day life. We are constantly immersed in a sea of new products and trends – many of which we subconsciously ignore. By being cognizant of such trends as a new fashion of clothes, a change in demographics, or a newly hyped product advertised on television, it is easy to find an idea in which to profitably invest.
Most of the book is a barrage of examples revolving around new trends. The author tries to show that money can be made at points all along the value chain – from basic raw materials to the latest “hot product.” She lists an endless number of investment plays including the baby boomers, green energy, and geopolitical news events.
BEWARE! This book may sound innocent by its cover, but I believe it does a great disservice to its audience. The author makes investing sound much easier than it actually is. Following her advice, a reader can easily be suckered into buying shares of a company with shoddy fundamentals. Very often a product may be hot, but the company’s management is in distress or the stock is overvalued. Hilary Kramer does very little to prepare investors for expecting the worst.
To further encourage reckless investing, she constantly inserts her own anecdotes of acting on a crackpot idea, and then doubling her money in the stock market. This could easily cause uninformed readers to forget that even the best of stock market pros make huge mistakes. If investing were as simple as buying shares of the newest restaurant in town, we would all be rich beyond our wildest dreams.
Ahead of the Curve plays on the prospective reader’s itch for easy money to sell a book. It only propagates the mentality that caused a preponderance of retail investors to loose unimaginable amounts of money at the end of the dot-com era.
Don’t waste your money on this. As an alternative, I suggest reading Real Money by Jim Cramer. Real Money incorporates some of Hilary Kramer’s concepts, but is much more encompassing and helpful to the retail investor.
Rating: 2 / 5
1:42 pm on July 21st, 2010
I had high expectations for this book. “Ahead of the curve” suggested an opportunity to gain insight for future profits. Ms. Kramer, instead relates her own experiences in a style which simply doesn’t match up to expectations. Of the hundreds of books I’ve read this was probably the biggest surprise in that there was very little guidance which I could put to my own use. Awareness of various factors is fine, but it is a very long jump from there to identifying stocks which have good to excellent prospects. This book reads like it was written by an absolute amateur in the market and I couldn’t recommend it to the most innocent beginner initiating an investment portfolio. There are much better books out there to identify trends.
Rating: 1 / 5
4:35 pm on July 21st, 2010
“Ahead of the Curve” is a magnificent book. I am a longtime follower and fan of Hilary’s, and I know her personally, and so I can say with a reasonable degree of certainty that she is every bit as intense and passionate about market trends in person as she is in her fabulous first book. The book is most useful for those who want to invest in the stock market. I think it’s pretty clear that if you wait until they recommend something on television, that it’s probably too late to take full advantage of the company’s recent success. Sure the stock may continue to go up a bit, but if you could have figured out what it was going to do before everyone on TV started saying that it was going up, then you would have been in much better shape.
Hilary is well known to AOL subscribers (which includes myself, for better or worse) as the columnist of “Hilary on Stocks”. She writes a daily column recommending a different stock, a formidable task especially considering the fact that people can track her success (or failure). She’s also a regular speaker on the nationally syndicated radio show Doug Stephan’s Good Day, where she talks about stocks and other economic trends. What the book does that you won’t get from any of these places is give you an overview of how she keeps “ahead of the curve”.
The book is well written and reads like a novel. Doing what she recommends, however, is not a five minute a day activity. Trend tip #5 for example, is be a news junkie, and trend tip #6 is study the stats. For those who do not want to make stock trend spotting their new consuming passion, the book is highly entertaining and gives you a very good insight into how Hilary and possibly other stock analysts make their choices. In the end, you can still rely on them for your actual stock choices. But for the more serious stock investor, the book can potentially help you tremendously to gain insight into how to choose the best stocks, and possibly make lots of money.
Rating: 5 / 5
4:36 pm on July 21st, 2010
She talks about simple thing in investing. The companies which do specialized work and are multiple level away from the direct reach of the customer are not mentioned. This is a small player. Not a good book for a value investor, though good for a housewife.
Rating: 3 / 5