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Rating: 
Summary: Great book!
Review: A great book for anyone who ever wondered what goes on behind closed doors on Wall Street. This book makes investing fun.
Rating: 
Summary: Junk
Review: I originally heard this work through Audible.com, and liked it enough that I've bought multiple hardcopies for friends and myself. The book provides a blueprint for personally managing a small number of stocks. This stock portfolio should be hedged by other diverse investments including safe money (i.e. fixed interest) and mutual funds. There is a lot of good advice throughout the book. They cover, in part, (1) why you should concentrate on a few stocks and know them inside and out, (2) metrics for determining an appropriate value for a stock, (3) effective screening tools in finding the gems, and (4) some no-nonsense views of how the stock market really operates with respect to analysts. Highly recommended.
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Summary: A "Must-Have" for the individual investor
Review: I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Mike Kwatinetz's outlines his approach to investing which is comprised of a dose of good common sense coupled with a easy-to-use set of analytical modeling techniques. This allows the investor to get beyond the hype that is so prevelant in today's tech environment to really get at understanding what's really going on in a company and what a company's "real" potential is. The book is full of useful antecdotes from Mike's vast Wall Street experience and network which provide valuable insight into how some of the best and brightest money managers and technology executives think. The easy readability of the book is another strong positive. You don't need a PhD. in Finance to understand it -- but even those with PhDs will get a lot out of it. If one of your new year's resoultions is to improve your personal finances, start by buying and reading this book.
Rating: 
Summary: Insightful!
Review: Mike Kwatinetz and Danielle Kwatinetz Wood, a father-daughter team, have written a readable volume of investment advice that will impress you with its fundamental soundness, if it does not dazzle you with buzzwords and newfangled formulas. With advice that flies in the face of the mantra of portfolio diversification, Mr. Kwatinetz shows how to narrow your portfolio and thereby compete with Wall Street professionals. The authors warn you away from the minefields sown by short-term thinking and guide you toward making that big stock-market score you've been hoping to achieve. The volume's Q & A sessions with stock market gurus are interesting, but appear to be afterthoughts. We from getAbstract recommend this book to regular investors and Wall Street insiders alike.
Rating:
Summary: A good perspective
Review: Mike Kwatinetz can really help the relatively sophisticated investor focus attention on the basic methodology of analyzing a prospective "buy". I particularly liked his approach to identifying new opportunities by "doing some (relatively simple) math". I would have liked it if Mike had prepared an excel spreadsheet example so that I could easily take his ideas and relate them to my portfolio. As it is, I plan to take his ideas and attempt to create my own spreadsheet so I can use them effectively. The book is written in an easy to read, interesting, and enjoyable style (credit Mike's daughter) . . . and I recommend it to anyone who is trying to make sense out of this difficult investment climate.
Rating: 
Summary: Buffetting High Tech
Review: The author applies Warren Buffett's main street investing approach to High Tech. Other reviewers gave the book a higher rating so I may have missed something but I found the book short on the specifics of timing (not something that interests Buffett either).
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Summary: Stalking the 100 Bagger Stock
Review: The authors set high goals for you and for themselves. "I want your stock investments to yield a 25 percent return." " . . . [T]his book is going to help you achieve those results." All of us would agree that such results are highly desirable. History suggests, however, that we are unlikely to achieve them. This excellent book is flawed by overoptimism about outperforming the averages. That arrogance is the only major flaw in what is otherwise a solid look at how to find higher performing technology stocks. The basic approach is a balanced one that involves concentrating your investments in individual stocks (generally recommended to be 30 percent of less of your portfolio) in 4 - 7 stocks; buy them cheap (and sell them high); do your homework before investing; find very fast revenue-growing companies (25+ percent) with great management who are long-term thinkers which customers love; and realize that best stocks are cheaper than you think. Mr. Kwatinetz is a well-respected PC hardware and software analyst, and the book is filled with excellent examples of how he correctly followed Microsoft and Dell to glory. He is also scrupulously honest, and tells you as much about his mistakes as about his successes. I liked this quality of the book very much. Another valuable element of the book is found in the many interviews with top institutional investors who share their experiences with success and failure. Borland is a recurring theme in these discussions. The company promised a breakthrough and did not deliver on time, and the window of opportunity closed on them. This message is part of the buy great management lesson. The authors warn about 7 deadly sins. These are hastiness, omission, arrogance, negligence, submissiveness, lethargy, and greed. Each is detailed in the section about doing your homework. But it is hard to realize that you are falling for these flaws while you have them. Another example of arrogance by the authors (presumably unwitting) is in the section on owning mutual funds (suggested as the core of your portfolio) that you take the time to pick out professional managers who will beat the averages by 3 percentage points a year. All the research I have seen says that only about 2 percent of managers do that well. More significantly, they cannot be found by looking at who just did so. The group of outperformers rotates a lot. On the other hand, they do point out the advantages of no-load index funds. If you follow that advice, you will be fine. An important minor weakness in the book is that it doesn't say enough about how to decide when to sell. Some stocks are never high in valuation terms, but should be sold because the company's performance is about to weaken. Many professionals rely on technical analysis to spot such advance warning of the need to sell. I liked the concept of a concentrated portfolio. That's what Warren Buffett uses, in part, to achieve his great success. Basically, you need two really big winners out of seven stocks for this to work well. That is a high average, however. Most people will probably find none or one. So keep your expectations in line with reality. I suspect that you should begin with this approach with less than 10 percent of your portfolio and see how you do before expanding it. On the whole, I thought that ChangeWave Investing was a better book for spotting where to investment in technology stocks. Capturing the most important trends is very significant, and this book did not pay enough attention to that. In the book, the subject is addressed. You are encouraged to invest in companies which will replace physical products and facilities, like on-line brokers, on-line custom manufacturers (like Dell), and virtual companies (like on-line booksellers). You are encouraged to focus on 10 segments for the future, such as Web infrastructure and Linux-based software. I thought that it was great that the two authors shared their portfolios. I was shocked however to see mostly companies in it that I would not think fit the authors' criteria. So much for how easy it is to do this analysis. As of the end of 1999, they both owned Applied Materials, Dell, and Microsoft. Mr. Kwatinetz also owned Boeing, Cisco, Compaq, Fannie Mae, Ford, Intel, and PaineWebber. Check the track record on those stocks since then, and I think you will be underwhelmed. The business performance has not been strong either. You should also think about whether you have the access and skill to use these methods. Do you know the difference between great management and average management? Are you likely to get the access to tell the difference? After you have finished studying this book, I suggest that you consider whether you have done an adequate job of setting your investment objectives first. The authors, to their credit, emphasize this. After you do this, you may find that you do not have to try to score with high tech stocks to achieve your objectives. Why then are you pursuing them? If it is for the thrill, that can be expensive. You could probably take less risk and lose less money by simply buying a lottery ticket every day. In my experience, the great times to buy high tech stocks come along only about 2 or 3 times a decade. The rest of the time you are better off ignoring them. I'm not sure we are in a place to begin buying them again now, even after the carnage of 2000. May you always meet your objectives for investing!
Rating:
Summary: Junk
Review: the most useful page in this book is in the excerpt provided by Amazon. Everything else is regurgitation magazine articles and common knowledge and doesn't provide and investing know how.
Rating:
Summary: Easy & fun to read, great insights on growth investing
Review: This book was fairly easy to read. The author made it very interesting. Most important points are his insights into growth investing and how to make it different than the other popular methods. Although there are lots of quantitative recomendations, I particularly liked his qualitative ones. For example, his recommendations on how to size up management were very good. I think it would be easy for anyone to follow his quantitative advice: coming up with ways to screen out stocks based on financial statistics. But the real test is in applying the qualitative screens -- this is what makes the horse race. In this light, his comments on: competitive advantage, loving companies that customers love, looking for long term thinkers were great. On the negative side, I think he could have better described the relationship between growth rates and PE ratios. Also, I think he knows alot more than he has told us. I hope he comes out with another book, or a newsletter that describe his views. I enjoyed his discussion about how growth rates return to a mean, and how to adjust your PE ratios to use next years numbers. Although his discussion of competitive advantage was good, I think there's a lot more here that could have been discussed. Overall, I rank it as "HIGHLY RECOMMENDED." John Dunbar
Rating:
Summary: Easy & fun to read, great insights on growth investing
Review: This book was fairly easy to read. The author made it very interesting. Most important points are his insights into growth investing and how to make it different than the other popular methods. Although there are lots of quantitative recomendations, I particularly liked his qualitative ones. For example, his recommendations on how to size up management were very good. I think it would be easy for anyone to follow his quantitative advice: coming up with ways to screen out stocks based on financial statistics. But the real test is in applying the qualitative screens -- this is what makes the horse race. In this light, his comments on: competitive advantage, loving companies that customers love, looking for long term thinkers were great. On the negative side, I think he could have better described the relationship between growth rates and PE ratios. Also, I think he knows alot more than he has told us. I hope he comes out with another book, or a newsletter that describe his views. I enjoyed his discussion about how growth rates return to a mean, and how to adjust your PE ratios to use next years numbers. Although his discussion of competitive advantage was good, I think there's a lot more here that could have been discussed. Overall, I rank it as "HIGHLY RECOMMENDED." John Dunbar
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