The Right Stock at the Right Time: Prospering in the Coming Good Years

The information in this book is not useful for making money in the stock market. If you are interested in value investing read The Intelligent Investor by Ben Graham, The Essays of Warren Buffett, and most anything written by Peter Lynch. If you are interested in more short term oriented strategies you need first to set up a good trading system. I would suggest Trading the Plan by Robert Deel. Unless you understand money management you will lose money. Period.

Good research into the stock market, presented in a clear and positive manner. Best of all it works I bought in early 2003 and have a handsome profit on all my stocks.

There are a number of good books on “Market Timing” and this would be in the top five. If you could afford to read three books on market timing, I would get Les Masonson’s book, Deborah Weir’s, and this one. If you want to first learn about market timing one a book at a time, get them in the same order I just listed them.

Each book covers some of the same ground but each offers a few nuggets that aren’t as well covered in the other two. Larry William’s book has the better documentation on the “Decade Effect”, an interesting correlation between each year in a decade and how the market has done in each of those ten years.

So, all in all, buy those three books and you will have a pretty complete understanding of timing the market on a macro-basis.

This book delivers on its promise…Williams gives clear and concise rules of market timing, tells why he bought at the 2002 lows and lays out when he thinks the next major bottoms will come.
I loved his ideas on what stocks to buy…lots of research here
that presents a convincing case of what values and ratios are found in stocks that go up, not down. The book also references great free resources to update his ideas on all my stocks.
All this is salted with some words of wisdom on trading and investing that sure makes sense to me.

I am sorry that I had read this book late, but hopefully it is not too late. In short, this is a book about very long term market timing through 100+ years of “statistical or historical analysis” plus some “trading philosophy”. The essence of it came in the first 40 pages (or 3 chapters out of 13), which can be summarized as:-
1. Optimal buy points come in years ending in twos and threes, followed by the incredibly strong five years, then in the fall of any year ending in seven. Most major highs have come in years ending in nine and zero.
2. Every four years we expect a market bottom. Incidentally one should be looking for significant market bottoms in 2006, 2010, 2014….
3. March buys in years ending in eights and September exits in years ending in nines gave spectacular results.
4. The Oct buy April sell % gain is significantly higher than the April buy Oct sell % gain.
5. Combining all the above, we should have a significant market rally in 2005 and another in 2006.
Up to this very day on Feb 2004 which is over nine months after it’s publication, what the author said was by and large correct. There is no reason not to recommend this book to anybody who got the patience and the courage to place a high probability bet.
p.s. With respect to the trading philosophy part, I would like to quote something from the book for your reference. Hope you like them.
1. October. This is one of the peculiarly dangerous months to speculate in stocks. The others are July, January, September, April, November, May, March, June, December, August and February. Mark Twain.
2. Markets dont top because sellers come into the marketplace. Markets top because there are simply no more buyers. Tom De Mark
3. The opposite of any generally accepted idea is worth a fortune to somebody. Francis Scott Fitzgerald Key

Larry Williams is a prolific author, trader, educator, and money manager. With over a quarter century of experience, Williams has provided investors with practical and easy-to-implement market timing and stock selection strategies in this just published book.
Williams initially focuses on the recurrent seasonal patterns in the market. Williams reveals one interesting strategy where he notes that excellent times to go long the market are years ending in twos (e.g., 1952, 1962 …… 1992) and threes. Just look at charts in those years or view them in this book to see those excellent buying points.
Williams also covers the best years of each decade to invest – fifth, eighth and ninth years. The consistency of these three years performance is 80%(positive returns in 8 out of 10 of those decade years). Next he covers the four-year cycle from 1858 to the present time (last 4-yr cycle years were 1994, 1998, 2002) showing that they were good times to buy at their yearly lows, many times occurring in the September/October timeframe.
Another strategy Williams covers in buying in October and selling in April. This strategy was offered by Stock Trader’s Almanac in 1986 developed by Yale Hirsch, and it still works today. This strategy has produced significant returns while reducing risk as investors are out of the market for half the year.
Williams provides a look at indicators to determine that a market bottom is in place. He covers such items as the Fed’s Stock Evaluation Model, margin credit, odd-lot short sales, Investors Intelligence Bull/Bear Index, US Bonds, and gold prices.
Williams covers in detail the fallacy of long-term investing and the devastation that it can wreak on investors portfolios. Investors who are die-hard “buy-and-holders” should read this chapter to learn that to use that strategy is dangerous.
To do well in the market, Williams urges investors to find stocks that have the capability to outperform the market, and then find the best time to buy them. He totally disagrees with the Wall Street cognoscenti that market-timing is useless.
He spends a chapter on buying stocks at a discount, and one on measuring investor sentiment on individual stocks. He lists seven traditional measures of value (e.g., P/E ratio, Price/Book) and elucidates on which ones work best.
All-in-all this well-written, easy to understand book provides investors with a systematic, time-tested approach to investing. Williams has again provided investors with another classic.

I am sure Larry Williams had good intentions when he wrote this book and the basic research certainly indicated that there was something to a seasonal cyclical affect as far as specific years within a decade going back to the late 1880’s. With that said, while I am not a statistician I would assume that there is not enough data points (14 as of today for each year within a decade) to really provide a significant conclusion. Nevertheless, I went to the trouble of updating the stats through 2019 and I can tell you the system is breaking down. While it is true the 5th year of a decade has proven quite lucrative over the past 140 years with zero down years, the last two decades have been barely positive with 2005 and 2015 being up 5% and <1%. Williams also touts the end of a 7th year of a decade as good buy point for an upswing in the 8th year. Things looked great for nearly a century until 2008 when the bottom fell out and the S&P dropped -41% and another drop of -4% in 2018.

Very good

Mostly make sense.

This was one of the first books on investment finance that I read and it definitely helped to shape my view of the markets. Larry Williams has done some amazing things over the years and anything he puts out is worth listening to.