Description
JK Lasser’s Buy, Sell, or Hold is designed to explore each of the 10 areas of study that every investor needs to master. It is organized to present the popular fallacies that many people believe and then offer alternatives. These fallacies are widely believed, so the majority of investors continue to operate on a false premise in one way or another.
Introduction:
It’s in the nature of investing that opportunity and risk are married in this way. The greater the opportunity, the greater the risk. So, every investor has to decide how much risk is appropriate, how much risk he or she can afford, and what portion of capital can be placed in higher-risk investments versus a base of lower-risk or moderate-risk ones.
Within this body of decisions, many questions arise that demand self-education. These questions can be broken down into 10 major areas of study:
- Identifying how and why stock prices actually change
- Forms of analysis that can help you decide when to buy, sell, or hold
- Applying popular forms of analysis to your portfolio
- Market risk
- Diversification
- Liquidity
- Volatility
- Leverage
- Rate of return
- Professional advice
These 10 areas of study involve a study of facts and sorting through of various kinds of information. You need to become a competent investor in order to work through the maze of things you need to consider in making your own judgments.
The alternative is to take advice from others, but sadly, good advice is difficult to find and experience shows that bad advice is far more abundant. So the bottom line is that investors really are on their own. In a market characterized by a large body of information, your biggest challenge is deciding which data are useful in the larger field.
Contents:
- The Pricing of Stocks
- Fundamental and Technical Analysis
- The “Practical” Dow Theory
- Identifying Investment Risk
- The Egg and Basket Idea
- Liquidity in the Market
- Volatility and Its Many Meanings
- Using Other Peoples’ Money
- Rates of Return
- Professional Advice for Investors
- Developing Your Comprehensive Program
