Customer Rating: 
Summary: Insightful!
Comment: If you can make it past the typical James Cramer stock-market cheerleading, The Street.com's guide to investing is well worth a look for novices. Skip over the dated, New Economy hype and get right to the overview of global equity markets, including risk factors, economic indicators and corporate performance measures. Author Dave Kansas does a great job of summarizing these voluminous concepts in a way that's easy to digest and remember. This book reads much better than most of those in the investment field, perhaps because it was written by actual writers, not economic experts fumbling their way through the writing process, or ghostwriters churning out personality-free prose. We from getAbstract highly recommend this book to beginning investors, with a word of warning: The tone of this book is still very much of the optimistic `90s era, and does not seem to reflect the subsequent market retreat.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Street Smarts
Comment: "It truly is a brave new world for investors," writes Dave Kansas at the conclusion of this book. The phrase "brave new world" comes from Shakespeare via Aldous Huxley, who of course used it ironically. It will be the rare investor who can read those words today without a twinge of pain: most of the last two years have been a bad trip for stock owners. Many people with money in the stock market have seen their gains evaporate like snow in Tucson. The more you know about how the market works, presumably, the less you are likely to succumb to the investor's perennial traps - fear and greed - or pay the price for naiveté. TheStreet.com Guide to Smart Investing in the Internet Era has a splendid pedigree, namely the web site TheStreet.com (and its sister site, RealMoney.com), and Kansas has called on a number of its shrewd writers to contribute sections in their own areas of expertise.
The book benefits from most of its writers having been "in the trenches," that is, actually having spent years trying to make money on Wall Street. They are not just journalists or academic theorists. The book, like the site that spawned it, has a pleasingly pragmatic quality.
It is also easy to read, insofar as a subject with as many complexities as equity investing can be easy. Even the through-the-looking-glass world of options almost seems to make sense in these pages. (But although the discussion includes shorting stocks and buying and selling puts, there is, curiously, no section about selling covered calls - the only form of options trading that is appropriate for many nonprofessional investors. The book's other major gap is that there is nothing about the strategy of indexing, which deserves consideration.)
It is evident that care went into this guide. It has been editorially polished, unlike so many quick-and-dirty productions from even supposedly reputable publishers today that appear to have gone directly from the author's word processor to type.
Just about all the important topics are covered in enough detail to be useful but not so much as to be esoteric. Also included are two worthwhile features that I have not seen in any other investment guide: a table, based on specific quantitative and qualitative criteria, of the best stock analysts in a variety of sectors; and another table ranking online brokers, based on a reader survey by TheStreet.com.
But while TheStreet.com Guide does many things well, and there is nothing particularly wrong with it, I have to confess to being mildly disappointed. The problem is style - or rather, the lack of it - rather than substance.
If you are familiar with TheStreet.com or RealMoney.com web sites (which I expect most of those who buy the book will be), you know that James Cramer, the sites' co-founder and frequent contributor, is that rare bird who can write about stocks with color, flair and wit. Many of the sites' other writers have something of the same ability. The web sites flash lightning; they're a gas to read as well as timely and informative. The book goes down smoothly, but it's rather bland. To see what I mean, compare its prose with that of the glossary, which is written by Cramer himself. (Sample Cramer-isms: "Dumb money: Slow money, usually mutual-fund or pension money." "Flip: When you get a hot stock and you blow it out immediately. The brokerages try to discourage flipping, but in this crazy market where only small bits of stock get floated at the beginning, there are a ton of flippers on these pops.")
If TheStreet.com Guide to Investing in the Internet Era as a whole had been written with this kind of sass, which appears regularly on the web site, it would have been more memorable. Nevertheless, the book is less work to read than most of its ilk, and will teach you things you don't know or encourage you to think freshly about things you do. For this "brave new world" of online investing, TheStreet.com Guide is worth its weight in armor plating.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Not what I expected from JJC
Comment: [...] The book is a good primer on fudamental and technical analysis, but that is about it. I suppose that my expectations were too high. I subscribe to the website spin-off of thestreet.com, and find the commentary, reporting, and trading tips well worth the money. This is the sort of hard hitting writing that I expected in the book. My opinion, save your money on the book and just use the website daily.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Good for the beginner, not sure about more than that
Comment: I was looking for something a bit more adept -- this is "investing for dummies" -- which has its place, but the title makes it look like it has some new ideas when, in fact, it's mostly advice you've read on thestreet.com and elsewhere, in one book. Valuable to a novice, a nice but unnecessary compendium for more experienced investors. While this book wasn't what I was looking for, I also think the rips on Cramer and thestreet.com are unwarranted and childish and the reviews based on those criticisms are off the mark.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Well written, fundamental advice
Comment: The information in this book is by no means ground breaking. However, it is a well written book that provides solid all around advice for the new investor.The book touches on many aspects of investing without being biased toward any particular one. It basically gives an overviews of many of the tools available to make investing decisions and leaves it to the reader to choose and learn more. For example, it starts out with an overview of economic factors and then moves into fundamental analysis, charting and buy/sell guidelines. It then touches on options, IPO's and tax issues.
Compared to other "newbie" books such as those by the Motley Fool, I think this offers a much more rounded approach. These books (and others) tend to present a biased view of the "correct" way to invest. This book gives a broader view that gives the reader more starting points to continue their learning and ultimately make better investing decisions.
One final comment -- there is not a lot of advertising for the thestreet.com in this book. Many chapters are accompanied by lists of websites to help you explore the topic presented in the chapter. Naturally, thestreet.com is often in the list, but all websites are given very fair treatment throughout the book.
