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Summary: An important book but I just wish it would have been written
Review: four years ago.And I'd read it. Don't be mislead by the title or the silly picture on the front. It's not "that" market timing. It's all about value investing and cardinal rules of investing. The book is brief and much of it is graphs and tables. It is more evidence than anything else. The book is easy to read but that doesn't mean it is simple minded. Just fundamental truths. Ben Stein is a national treasure. I also loved his other book, "How to Ruin Your Life." It was placed in the comedy section of the bookstore. Wrong location.
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Summary: Douglas
Review: Great book! Finally someone has written a book that blows away the fog surrounding the sophisticated world of wall street and investing. Value, P/E's, dividends and profits really do matter. Presented in a manner that even I can understand, it could have been titled, "Even Dummies can Time the Market". The book also provides historical perspective on the market's performance and metrics for comparison.
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Summary: An excellent read for investors of all experience levels
Review: I am young and very new to the world of investing so after seeing Ben promoting the book on TV a few days ago I decided to read it. I found it so interesting and incredibly straight forward that it seemed to take no time to finish. I don't see how anybody could deny that you CAN time the market (in the long run). It contains an incredible amount of good advice. I've cracked the covers of many investment advice books and I simply have not found another so straight forward and easy to comprehend.
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Summary: Good Graphic Use of Statistical Data
Review: In 1929 an investor owning a basket of stocks representing the S&P 500 Index would have seen a return of 84%...in twenty years. Making the same investment just two years later would have produced an 818% move. Timing is important. Investing for the 'long run' is no excuse for buying stocks when they are expensive. Stein and DeMuth make the case that an investment may be a bargain when its current price is lower than its long-term average. This is simply due to the fact that points of data tend to follow their own laws of gravity and "regress" to long-term averages after periods of sharp out/under performance. Let's define long-term as a fifteen year period. Let's also invest in the market using indexed securities and specifically one key market index, the S&P 500 Index, because of the singular unpredictability of individual stocks. Here are some conclusions: By almost all historical measure today's stock market is still overvalued. The index average of the S&P 500 and S&P 500 dividend yield appear to be the most reliable indicators of whether the market is over or undervalued. Own bonds and avoid stocks when they are expensive relative to their long-term averages. The always touted benefits of dollar cost averaging, and mechanical portfolio rebalancing to a preconceived percentage allocation, miss the point. Investments can be timed. The difficulty in all this is that the authors' findings point to the "general direction" of the market over "long periods of time". Investors will need the patience of Job and a steely discipline to be in or out of the market for multi-year periods. Meanwhile, experience shows us that much money is also made and lost in the margins, in the short-term. Using the data, investors would have begun moving out of the market in the mid to late 1980's thus avoiding the sharp break in the market in 1987 and the extended bear market that began in 2000. But investors would have also missed the spectacular blow-off gains in the 1990's. Investors would be smart to use this book as a guide for adjusting their allocation to a variety of asset classes and use long-term trends to temper short-term emotion.
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Summary: Simply The Best Book About Investing Out There
Review: Okay, we all know Ben Stein is a smart guy from Win Ben Stein's Money. What I did not know was that he and apparently his co-author Phil DeMuth know a fantastic amount about investing. He has studied it at Yale and Columbia and been a major commentator about it in Barrons for twenty years. The results are impressive. This is a book about investing for the long term, and it makes total sense. It says not to base your buys on fads and chat rooms or day trading gambles, but to use the basics of earnings, dividends, book value, sales,and long term price trends
to find out whether stocks are cheap or expensive, and what your prospects are for major long term gains based on historical criteria, not on guesswork. If I had known this stuff I would never have gotten caught in the bursting of the bubble in 2000 and with it, I will never get caught with my pants down again. If I had to recommend only one book to long term investors, it would be Yes, You Can Time The Market. I think the people who gave it bad reviews must be day traders looking for the next bubble. This book is not for them. Yes, You Can Time The Market is for serious investors who want to make money without taking insane risks. get it and grow rich slowly but surely.
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Summary: Another tired you can beat the market book
Review: Some may be able to beat the market some of the time. But no one does all the time and the average person will do far better indexing. The evidence is overwhelming. But this idea of market timing will not die even after a terrible bear market such as the one we have been in. Unfortunately, when it comes to money, most never learn their lesson. Coming out of this bear market, many will be initially successful but over the long haul most will lag the S&P 500. This gets back to the idea that everybody can be a winner in the market and can beat the averages. Even though I believe in stock selection indexing is probably the way to go for those monies we will have to have in the future.
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Summary: Another tired you can beat the market book
Review: Some may be able to beat the market some of the time. But no one does all the time and the average person will do far better indexing. The evidence is overwhelming. But this idea of market timing will not die even after a terrible bear market such as the one we have been in. Unfortunately, when it comes to money, most never learn their lesson. Coming out of this bear market, many will be initially successful but over the long haul most will lag the S&P 500. This gets back to the idea that everybody can be a winner in the market and can beat the averages. Even though I believe in stock selection indexing is probably the way to go for those monies we will have to have in the future.
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Summary: "Rational advice for Irrational Times"
Review: Stein and DeMuth have grabbed the stock market by the neck and, through brute statistical analysis, forced it to reveal its secret inner clockworks. Don't be fooled by the jokey cover or the irreverent tone: this is a book that ranks with Graham's Intelligent Investor and Malkiel's Random Walk Down Wall Street in terms of its practical importance to investors.
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Summary: Savvy advice that can make and preserve a fortune, long-term
Review: Stein and DeMuth succeed impressively in their primary aim, which is to prove that there are better times than others to invest in the stock market, and that a market timer who pays attention to the signals they describe can achieve significantly higher returns than a steady investor who buys in regardless of price. To determine whether the market is over- or under-priced, they rely upon valuation methods that will please the heart of a classically trained economist or business school student: price, P/E ratio, dividend rate, and price-to-book, comparing today's figures to the 15-year moving average. Examining the performance of the S&P 500 over the past century, they convincingly prove that a strategy of doubling up investments in "buy" (under-valued) years and avoiding investing in over-valued years delivers superior performance to a buy-and-hold (or dollar cost averaging) strategy. Although what Stein and DeMuth have proven seems like common sense from one angle (buy heavily when prices are low), it is not what most of Wall Street and the financial press urges investors to do. Nor is it emotionally easy to follow this advice, since it means buying at times such as the middle of the Great Depression, when the popularity of stock market investing is at its lowest ebb, and it means avoiding buying when the market is zooming to the moon, and it seems as though every neighbor of yours is making a fortune in Internet and telecom stocks (the late Nineties). Stein and DeMuth do a great job describing these situations, to provide the internal fortitude needed to follow a buy low strategy. The debate over this book arises over how applicable it is to the average individual investor (its target audience). All the research conducted by Stein and DeMuth concerns the S&P 500, and they freely admit that the conclusions they draw do not necessarily apply to other indices, markets, or individual stocks. Furthermore, they look at 20-year results, so the final verdicts for the last 20 years (including the bull market of the '90s) are not in yet. However, Stein and DeMuth cite many others studies that are aligned with their general strategy of buying under-valued stocks, and summarize the superior results that these other studies report. Because of this, and the book's sharp wit and hard-hitting style, this book is a great introduction to value investing and the fundamental methods of valuing stocks. The boom and bust of the late Nineties and early 2000s prove that far too many investors (and professionals) don't pay enough attention to stock market valuation. This book won't tell you how to make a quick fortune. It won't tell you how to identify the next Microsoft or Dell Computer. But it does tell you how to identify better times to invest in stocks, and can help you avoid huge losses from investing in bubbles. Because of the strength of the book's advice, which recent history proves is so often ignored, and the fact that it is a short and entertaining read, I highly recommend it.
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Summary: "Timing The Market" is Profound Investment Wisdom !!!
Review: Thanks for co-authoring a serious and well researched treatise on investing. I think this work will become a classic. I admire your courage to combat the shibboleth "you can't time the market" mantra that is so often sibilated. With this kind of exhaustive research you have uncovered some of the secrets of Wall Street. I hope the title doesn't scare serious and methodical investors away. It is catchy but sounds like a short term solution, which I know the book is not about or recommending. In fact you mentioned many times that the greatest profits go to those who buy Low and Hold long. And as we know from the mutual fund industry the average investor buys high and sells frequently. Thankyou for this wonderful book.
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