Rule #1: The Simple Strategy for Successful Investing in Only 15 Minutes a Week!,Books,Free Shipping,0307336840,

	Rule #1: The Simple Strategy for Successful Investing in Only 15 Minutes a Week! by Phil Town
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Product Details Binding Paperback Dewey Decimal Number 332.6 EAN 9780307336842 ISBN 0307336840 Manufacturer Three Rivers Press Number Of Items 1 Number Of Pages 336 Publication Date August 28, 2007 Publisher Three Rivers Press Release Date August 28, 2007 Availability Usually ships in 24 hours Product Description Phil Town is now a very wealthy man, but he wasn't always. In fact, he was living on a salary of $4000 a year when some well-timed advice launched him down a highway of investing self-education that revealed what the true 'rules' are and how to make them work in one's favor. Chief among them, of course, is 'rule #1': 'don't lose money.' Other rules are: don't diversify...think like an owner, not an investor ... never, ever be seduced into thinking the market is efficient. Town also believes strongly in 'betting on the jockey,' putting your faith in managers who've proven their financial mettle. Not only does Town reveal fresh methods for identifying who the truly reliable managers are, but he shows you how to test whether they really have faith in the businesses they're running. By far, the most controversial of the audiobook's assertions will be that giant 401(k) type mutual funds can't help but regress to the mean, and in the next twenty years, the mean could be very disappointing indeed. There's a very real chance that a 401(k) investor could see his holdings not grow at all in the next few decades. Fortunately, Town's stockpicking techniques are meant to walk investing phobes through the do-it-yourself process, equipping them with the tools they need to make quantum leaps toward financial security. Rule #1 says something new, and it says it in a way that every listener can understand. From the Compact Disc edition. Starred Review. For amateur investors who admire the incredible returns produced by Benjamin Graham–Warren Buffett–style value investing but can't figure out how to replicate these billionaires' methods at home, Town's investment guide is manna from heaven. A former river-rafting guide, Town learned how to calculate such crucial numbers as Return on Investment Capital and Equity Growth Rate from 'Wolf,' a wealthy rafter whom Town saved from a rapid in 1980. Under Wolf's tutelage, Town learned how to turn $1,000 into $1 million in five years, but the selection of lucrative stocks took weeks of library research. In this engaging and accessible book, Town shows readers how to replicate that sort of exhaustive market research on the Internet—and shorten the research time to just a few hours per stock. Fans of The Intelligent Investor will recognize that Town's Rule #1 formula—'1) Find a wonderful business, 2) Know what it's worth as a business, 3) Buy it at 50 percent off, 4) Repeat until very rich'—is a variation of Benjamin Graham's investment philosophy. (Graham and Buffett are cited heavily throughout the book.) But Town's ability to break down that philosophy into a detailed, step-by-step program that can be understood by any reader with basic math skills is unique. His chummy, reassuring tone ('If you're finding yourself already a bit overwhelmed, take a deep breath') will leave readers feeling empowered and ready to manage their money themselves. (Mar. 21) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. “Town's investment guide is manna from heaven… engaging and accessible… Town’s ability to break down that philosophy into a detailed, step-by-step program that can be understood by any reader with basic math skills is unique… will leave readers feeling empowered and ready to manage their money themselves.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) “Extraordinarily readable…provides investors with surefire tools to outperform costly advisors. Follow Town’s simple, time-tested precepts, and even unsophisticated investors will leave most mutual fund managers in the dust.” —Arthur Levitt, author of Take on the Street and former Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission “A really smart, homework-driven read that tells you precisely how to do it. *Rule #1* may be the clearest and best book out there to get you on the path to riches. This one’s special!” —James J. Cramer, host of CNBC’s “Mad Money” and Markets Commentator, thestreet.com *“Rule #1* is an investment Bible for our time*. In fun, easy-to-understand words, Phil Town tells you how to buy quality stocks at a discount.” —Rich Karlgaard, publisher, Forbes* magazine, and author of LIFE 2.0 *“For the individual investor, Rule No. 1 should be, ‘Read Rule #1.’* This book debunks a lot of myths in the market and provides pearls of common-sense wisdom…Indeed, Rule #1 rules.” —Gene Marcial, Senior Writer, Business Week “Rule #1’s common-sense, pragmatic approach is money in the bank. This step-by-step guide is methodically researched and terrifically accessible … Can you really beat the mutual fund mangers and so-called experts at their own game? He... “Town's investment guide is manna from heaven… engaging and accessible… Town’s ability to break down that philosophy into a detailed, step-by-step program that can be understood by any reader with basic math skills is unique… will leave readers feeling empowered and ready to manage their money themselves.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) “Extraordinarily readable…provides investors with surefire tools to outperform costly advisors. Follow Town’s simple, time-tested precepts, and even unsophisticated investors will leave most mutual fund managers in the dust.” —Arthur Levitt, author of Take on the Street and former Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission “A really smart, homework-driven read that tells you precisely how to do it. *Rule #1* may be the clearest and best book out there to get you on the path to riches. This one’s special!” —James J. Cramer, host of CNBC’s “Mad Money” and Markets Commentator, thestreet.com *“Rule #1* is an investment Bible for our time*. In fun, easy-to-understand words, Phil Town tells you how to buy quality stocks at a discount.” —Rich Karlgaard, publisher, Forbes* magazine, and author of LIFE 2.0 *“For the individual investor, Rule No. 1 should be, ‘Read Rule #1.’* This book debunks a lot of myths in the market and provides pearls of common-sense wisdom…Indeed, Rule #1 rules.” —Gene Marcial, Senior Writer, Business Week “Rule #1’s common-sense, pragmatic approach is money in the bank. This step-by-step guide is methodically researched and terrifically accessible … Can you really beat the mutual fund mangers and so-called experts at their own game? Hell yes!” —Jonathan Hoenig, Portfolio Manager, Capitalistpig Hedge Fund, and regular contributor to Fox News Channel *“Rule #1* is probably one of the most inclusive, no nonsense, fundamental books about investing in the stock market I’ve ever read.** This book is a must-read for everyone; from beginner students of the market to super know-it-alls.” —Danielle Hughes, President and CEO, Divine Capital Markets LLC “A refreshing departure from those boring investing books… If you're tired of being shut out of how exactly the rich guys on Wall Street make money, this important book will teach you how to run with the bulls. It's priceless.” —Elizabeth MacDonald, Senior Editor at Forbes Magazine; regular, “Forbes on Fox” From the Hardcover edition. Phil Town is now a very wealthy man, but he wasn't always. In fact, he was living on a salary of $4000 a year when some well-timed advice launched him down a highway of investing self-education that revealed what the true 'rules' are and how to make them work in one's favor. Chief among them, of course, is 'rule #1': 'don't lose money.' Other rules are: don't diversify...think like an owner, not an investor ... never, ever be seduced into thinking the market is efficient. Town also believes strongly in 'betting on the jockey,' putting your faith in managers who've proven their financial mettle. Not only does Town reveal fresh methods for identifying who the truly reliable managers are, but he shows you how to test whether they really have faith in the businesses they're running. By far, the most controversial of the audiobook's assertions will be that giant 401(k) type mutual funds can't help but regress to the mean, and in the next twenty years, the mean could be very disappointing indeed. There's a very real chance that a 401(k) investor could see his holdings not grow at all in the next few decades. Fortunately, Town's stockpicking techniques are meant to walk investing phobes through the do-it-yourself process, equipping them with the tools they need to make quantum leaps toward financial security. Rule #1 says something new, and it says it in a way that every listener can understand. From the Compact Disc edition. He isn’t your typical Wall Street guy. An ex-Green Beret and former river guide, Phil Town is a self-made millionaire several times over and America’s most widely sought-after speaker on investing. In his new book, RULE #1, he describes the Rule #1 personal financial strategy in detail so that anyone, even first-time investors,can get–and stay–rich. Phil Town is the classic Everyman, albeit one whose education and resources were more limited than most. An average high school student, he completed college on his fourth try. Of his early working years, he says he “mostly got dirty for a living,” taking on jobs such as digging ditches and pumping gas. Town spent three and a half years in the Army. He returned from the Vietnam War and found a job in the States as a river guide. Drifting through California, Utah, and Idaho, he subsisted at poverty level, combining his wages from the guiding season and unemployment. He wore black leathers, sported a goatee, lived in a teepee in the woods near Flagstaff, Arizona, and “drove around in a really loud black Harley Davidson.” In the early ‘80s, Town’s life changed radically. He was guiding trustees from the educational program Outward Bound down the nastiest rapid on the Grand Canyon’s Colorado River, when his split-second decisions saved a boatload of people from a whitewater disaster. A grateful and financially astute client returned the favor by guiding Town into serious, successful investing using the first rule of investing as ascribed to by Warren Buffett: Don’t lose money. Within five years, Town had built a borrowed $1,000 into $1 million. His fortunes improved radically, and rapidly, from then on. Phil Town appears regularly on the same dais as Rudy Giuliani, Jimmy Carter, and Colin Powell as part of the “Get Motivated” touring success seminar. He speaks to more than 500,000 people annually about Rule #1. Town lives in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. From the Hardcover edition. Table of Contents Introduction: Make Money No Matter What 1 Chapter 1: The Myths of Investing 11 Chapter 2: Rule #1 and the Four Ms 33 Chapter 3: Buy a Business, Not a Stock 39 Chapter 4: Identify a Moat 53 Chapter 5: The Big Five Numbers 65 Chapter 6: Calculate the Big Five 95 Chapter 7: Bet on the Jockey 111 Chapter 8: Demand a Margin of Safety 132 Chapter 9: Calculate the Sticker Price 145 Chapter 10: Know the Right Time to Sell 172 Chapter 11: Grab the Stick 186 Chapter 12: The Three Tools 196 Chapter 13: Take Baby Steps 216 Chapter 14: Eliminate the Barriers 246 Chapter 15: Prepare for Your First Rule #1 Purchase 259 Chapter 16: Q&A 274 Glossary 293 Acknowledgments 301 Index 303 Chapter 1: The Myths of Investing An expert is a person who avoids small error as he sweeps on to the grand fallacy. —Benjamin Stolberg (1891–1951) The gold standard of low-risk investing is a ten-year United States Treasury bond, which, at the time of this writing, has a return of about 4 percent. Invest in nothing but these bonds and you’re guaranteed a 4-percent haul. The only problem with such a strategy, especially for the millions of soon-to-be-retired baby boomers, is that, at 4 percent, it takes 18 years to double your money. In addition, after 18 years, even with a low inflation rate of 2 to 3 percent, most of the gain is absorbed by higher prices, leaving you with only slightly more buying power than you had 18 years earlier. Despite this reality, investors buy billions of dollars of these 4-percent bonds. Why in the world would anyone want to own a bond that barely keeps pace with inflation and realizes almost no real gain in wealth? Because almost everyone is convinced that a higher rate of return necessarily means a lot more risk. And they’re more afraid of losing money in an attempt to get a higher return than of their inability to retire comfortably. The fact is, a higher rate of return is not necessarily contingent on incurring significantly more risk. Let me explain. HIGH RETURNS DON’T NECESSARILY MEAN MORE RISK During a talk at the America West Arena in Phoenix, Arizona, I asked the audience, “How many of you drove your cars here today?” Most people raised their hands. “Okay, almost everybody. And how many of you took a huge risk driving here?” A few hands went back up. “You guys took a huge risk driving here?” I asked incredulously. “Either you drivers didn’t really take a risk and are just clowning around, or at last we’ve found the problem with Phoenix traffic—you people with your hands up don’t know how to drive. Is that it?” Everybody laughed. “Okay, so it wasn’t so terrifying to drive down here. But now imagine that you’re coming here but instead of you doing the driving, it’s your eleven-year-old nephew behind the wheel. Are you taking a lot of risk now?” People laughed and nodded yes. “The trip was the same—going from Ato B. But when you put someone in the driver’s seat who doesn’t know how to drive, a relatively safe trip becomes an incredibly risky trip.” Exactly the same thing holds true for your journey to financial freedom. If you don’t know what you’re doing, your journey is going to be either very slow or very dangerous. That’s why most people think that going fast (going after a high rate of return) is dangerous—because they don’t know how to drive the financial car, and not because going fast is necessarily dangerous. It’s only dangerous if you don’t know what you’re doing. And the essence of Rule #1 is knowing what you’re doing—investing with certainty so you don’t lose money! Now, you’re probably wondering, “What about mutual funds? What about all those techniques we learn to minimize risk and maximize returns?” Well, folks, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but here’s the truth: Being a mutual fund investor is a whole lot riskier than being a Rule #1 investor. Investing in a mutual fund is, in many ways, like handing your car keys to that 11-year-old nephew. THE MUTUAL FUND SCAM If you own mutual funds that are attempting to beat the market, and you’re hoping your fund manager can give you a nice retirement, you’re highly likely to be the victim of a huge scam. You’re not alone—100 million investors are right there with you. Fortune magazine reports that since 1985 only 4 percent of all the fund managers beat the S&P 500 index, and the few who did it did so by only a small margin. In other words, almost no fund managers have done what they’re paid by you to do—beat the market. That significant fact went unnoticed through the roaring 1980s and 1990s as the stock market surged with double-digit growth, bringing your fund manager along for the joyride. But now the ride is over, and investors are starting to notice that their fund managers are pretty much useless. This is not a new observation. Several years ago, Warren Buffett said this about your fund manager: “Professionals in other fields, like dentists, bring a lot to the layman, but people get nothing for their money from professional money managers.” The key word here is nothing. And yet, what do you do? You give your hard-earned money to one of these guys and hope he can deliver those 15-percent-or-better returns, like the ones you got in the 1990s. Why? Because you don’t want to invest your own money, and because you’ve been convinced by the entire financial services industry that you can’t do it yourself. Come on, get real. From 2000 to 2003, mutual funds lost half their value. You could have lost 50 percent of your money without the help of a professional. In fact, in 1996 a monkey was hired to compete with the best fund managers in New York. He beat them two years in a row. When I told this story one day to an audience in Los Angeles, someone from the upper deck in the Arrowhead Pond Arena yelled out, “What’s the name of the chimp?” This is proof that some people will do anything to avoid investing their own money. Peter Lynch, one of the few fund managers who made above-market returns and then got out before the market leveled him, wrote in his book One Up on Wall Street that the amateur investor has “numerous built-in advantages, which, if exploited, should result in outperforming the market and the experts.” In other words, you should be doing this yourself. But you don’t. The reason you don’t is that the entire financial services industry perpetuates three myths of investing to keep people investing with them in spite of the industry’s dismal performance over any long period. THE THREE MYTHS OF INVESTING Myth 1. You Have to Be an Expert to Manage Money. The first myth I want to bust is that it takes a lot of time and expertise to manage your money. It would if investing were hard to learn or if getting the information to make a decision took a lot of time. I’ll prove to you that it doesn’t, even though the financial services industry wants us to believe it does. The industry stands to make billions from commissions and fees if it can keep you thinking you can’t do it on your own. The Internet has changed everything. Now the tools that used to cost $50,000 a year are available for less than two bucks a day and take only minutes a day to use instead of 50 hours a week. And the Internet tools are more accurate, more timely, and easier to apply than anything your fund manager had just a couple of years ago. All you need is a little instruction and a brief learning period. But don’t bother to ask your broker, financial planner/adviser, certified public accountant (CPA), or fund manager if you should do this on your own. You know what they’re going to say. Something like, “But that’s what I do for you, so you don’t have to worry about it.” Well, you should worry about it. Alot. It’s your money and you’re the only one who really cares about what happens to it. Even the pros like Jim Cramer, a guy who’s in your corner and who wants to see you invest on your own, doesn’t really know what it’s like to be one of us. Like the rest of the top of the financial industry, Jim’s Ivy League, incredibly smart, loves playing with stocks all day and night, lives it and breathes it and has no sense of what it’s like to be you and me out there digging ditches someplace and hoping we can retire. For these guys it’s a game. Aserious game, but still a game. Jim’s a trader and loves to speculate. Following his approach, you’ve got to put in five to ten hours a week minimum and you’re playing a very dangerous game with money you can’t afford to lose against really rich, really smart, and really motivated guys—guys just like Jim. If you think you can win at that game, be my guest. And if you do win, my hat goes off to you. You’re a lot smarter than the rest of us. For everybody else, me included, there has to be another way. Most of us don’t have five hours a week for investing. Let’s face it. We’ve got kids to raise, lives to live, and jobs that already take more time than we have. We also don’t want to be chained to watching the stock market or to become frantic day traders. What fun would that be? We’re just looking for something to invest in that gets really great returns without the risk of losing money and without spending a lot of time at it. Rule #1 is investing for the rest of us. *Myth 2. You Can’t Beat the Market.* Okay, it&#8... With bulletproof arguments and statistics to back up his advice, Phil Town says you can make money choosing individual stocks that you research, understand, and love instead of letting a money manager squander your money in an under-performing fund. Though his narration is flat, there is excitement in the author's personal story and in this well-crafted lesson. With motivating clarity Town explains how to analyze every conceivable aspect of a publicly traded company--product viability, brand strength, competitive advantages and weaknesses, management, financial soundness, etc. Though his approach is decidedly fundamentalist, Town says it also will help traders--if they do their homework. An energizing lesson to wake up your inner stock-picking genius. T.W. © AudioFile 2006, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine Customers who bought this item also bought The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich Jim Cramer's Real Money: Sane Investing in an Insane World The Neatest Little Guide to Stock Market Investing Jim Cramer's Stay Mad for Life: Get Rich, Stay Rich (Make Your Kids Even Richer) The Intelligent Investor: The Definitive Book on Value Investing. A Book of Practical Counsel (Revised Edition) Customer Reviews for: Rule #1: The Simple Strategy for Successful Investing in Only 15 Minutes a Week! Rating - Strange mixture of fundamental investing and technical analysis I bought this because I wanted to learn how the author married up value concepts and technical analysis. This is possible, but why bother? if you identify value stocks, then why not hold them as Buffet does through thick and thin. The author suggests timing purchases by using MACD (8day and 17 day), Stochastics (14 day) and a 10 day moving average- this -imho-and I have looked at this on quite a number of charts- is ridiculous. you are using short ... Read More Rating - Every Investor, Entrepreneur, and Doer MUST Read This Book: Understand What Great Business Is and How to Profit from It In today's chaotic times, the only person you can rely on is yourself to create the life and the future you desire. Phil Town follows the fundamental and value analysis that have made Warren Buffet, Peter Lynch, and Benjamin Graham legendary investors. He breaks down technical details into simple methods anyone can learn and apply. The basics of Rule #1 investing are: 1. Find a wonderful business 2. Know what it's worth as ... Read More Rating - No nonsense disciplined approach. I watched Phil Town speak at a motivational seminar several years ago. His rags to riches story is what compelled me to start investing. Though I didn't follow his advice at first... I rolled my old 401k over to a self directed IRA.. I made and lost money doing my own thing. I just recently bought his book and it's changed my view, and my account balance for the better. This book has a "investing for dummies" sense about it. It holds ... Read More Rating - Great Foundation to Screen Stocks The best book I have read on investing. I was able to develop a stock screener in MSN Money. If you have an online brokerage account and have access to Reuter's you quickly access 10 year growth rates (as prescribed in his book) without doing any calculation. A formual for picking the soundest investments. see more reviews See all books by author Phil Town

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