The Successful Investor: What 80 Million People Need to Know to Invest Profitably and Avoid Big Losses

In The Successful Investor, O’Neil steps up to tell all investors how they can make money and, more important, avoid losses in up markets, down markets, and everything in between. Showing how mistakes made in the recent market collapse were amazingly similar to those made in previous down cycles, O’Neil reveals simple steps investors can follow to avoid costly mistakes.

Author’s Note:

Why this book now? If you’re a stock or mutual fund investor, you probably already know the answer. Chances are you’re one of the 80 million Americans who lost 50 to 80 percent of your hard-earned life savings in the market decline that began in the spring of 2000. And you never, ever want that to happen again. But unless you make it a point to learn what happened to you-what went wrong and whythere’s no guarantee that history won’t repeat itself.

The purpose of this book is to help you see some of the mistakes you made and could make again unless you adopt sound rules and principles to guide your future investment decisions. Only then will you be on the road to the kind of investment results that can and will materially improve your life. And if you’re a new investor, you certainly want to learn what not to do as well as what to do to become a successful investor.

But, you say, wasn’t the recent market debacle a once-in-alifetime event? Well, yes and no. The market bubble that formed in the anything-goes 1990s and blew up in the early 2000s was unusual. We hadn’t seen anything like it in 70 years. But it was different only in degree. If measured by the NASDAQ, home to most of the high-tech stocks that got so inflated, the 1990s market went up even more than the superheated bull run of the Roaring Twenties. And the losses that followed rivaled those suffered in the Crash of 1929 that led to the Great Depression.

The wild market of the 1990s can even be equated with the tulip bulb mania of 1636. Everyone then believed the whole world would have to buy tulip bulbs from Holland. As a result, prices of bulbs traded on the Dutch stock exchange reached astronomical heights before they came crashing down to earth. It was much the same with the Internet craze of the 1990s, when investors had to own a piece of every company with “dot-com” attached to its name.

Otherwise, the latest market cycle was much like all those that preceded it. I know. I’ve been in the market day in and day out, through every bull and bear cycle, for the last 45 years-both as an individual investor and as an advisor to many of the best investment managers in the country. Moreover, as the head of a top database research firm, I’ve also conducted one of the most definitive studies ever done of the market and the stocks that always lead it.

Contents:

• A Word About Charts
• Step 1 Which Way Is the General Market Going?
• Step 2 Use a Simple 3-to-1 Profit-and-Loss Percentage Plan
• Step 3 How to Buy the Very Best Stocks at the Very Best Time
• Step 4 When to Sell and Nail Down Your Big Profit While You Still Have It
• Step 5 Managing Your Portfolio: Time-Proven Methods to Maximize Results and Minimize Losses

The Successful Investor: What 80 Million People Need to Know to Invest Profitably and Avoid Big Losses By William J. O'Neil pdf