Books on Investing: Discussions, Reports & Suggestions

» Bill_Duffy - Running Money

an example of his writing from http://andykessler.com/

WSJ: We Think, They Sweat
December 23, 2004
You want a scapegoat for the dollar’s almost daily decline - the Chinese water torture on the U.S. economy? I blame Steve Jobs. I mean Apple is the worst offender in the decline of U.S. manufacturing. Their well paid engineers sit around in air-conditioned offices on streets with cutesy names like Infinite Loop in Cupertino, California and have others make stuff for them. They imported some 2 million iPods assembled by thousands and thousands of Chinese workers just last quarter - an almost $1.5 billion annualized trade deficit in iPods alone.

Those in Washington that can do something about this – former railroaders and soon breakfast cereal moguls, are so worried about trade deficits that they refuse to defend the once mighty greenback, even begging the Chinese to unpeg the renminbi from the dollar so we can decline against it as well. We’re in a place called Vertigo. Economists weep every news cycle that foreigners will no longer fund our spending and that America surely has peaked. The dollar is destined to the depths of despair until it drops so low that we get those manufacturing jobs back. Gee, thanks Steve Jobs.

A $1.5 billion trade deficit increases wealth in the U.S. by some $16 billion – I’ll take that trade any day.

I checked my wallet and realized that I own dollars, including my bank account, house and stocks. Lowering them in value hurts every American. I was in such a funk thinking about all this that I played my own infinite loop of Muddy Waters and B.B. King on my appropriately blue iPod mini. While needlessly fidgeting, I happened to turn it over and read the fine print. Sure enough – it says “Assembled in China.” But it also says “Designed by Apple in California.” In the middle of the song “Trouble No More,” it all started making sense.

Over the last year, two things have happened. First, Apple has increased their sales by over a third, almost all of it from increased sales of iPods – those 2 million of them at $265 each last quarter and another 100 million songs sold via their iTunes service. An iPod is just the combination some Apple software, cheap disk drives and a $12 chip a Silicon Valley company named PortalPlayer. I calculated that Apple pays $200 each per iPod to Chinese assembler Inventec to slap it all together. Even with cheap labor, Inventec has almost no profits, I’d bet under $10, probably more like $4. PortalPlayer, by the way, emails their design to Taiwan to be fabricated, with profits of some $5 per chip.

The second change since a year ago is that Apple’s stock has gone from $21 to $64. Pretty cool, capitalism at its best. Why? Because Apple keeps $65 per iPod - money chases profits! If you assume the stock increase is all due to the iPod (it is), then that business is worth some $15 billion. Add in PortalPlayer’s market value of almost $1 billion and you start to get a feel for how the world works. A $1.5 billion trade deficit increases wealth in the U.S. by some $16 billion – I’ll take that trade any day. So will all the holders of the retirement accounts at Vanguard and Fidelity and Janus and Lord Abbett who own Apple’s stock. Why am I caring about deficits again?

Trade deficits are just an economic construct, and lowering the dollar won’t solve a thing. We are already moving low margin, low paying jobs overseas, but fortunately, are left with high margin, high paying intellectual property jobs. Would you rather own Apple making a margin of $65 or Invetec with $4, on the same product? Me too. We may have trade deficits of $550 billion this year and, but we enjoy a huge margin surplus.

The very illogical way (so no one believes it) to get this all back in balance is for the dollar to RISE - require more TVs and BMWs to pay for our intellectual property. A lower dollar means foreigners get a needless discount on our productive stuff - Pentiums and iPods and Windows XP and Oracle databases and Cisco routers. They have to buy them anyway to run their economies (well, maybe not iPods) so why the discount? Add non-productive but life enhancing intellectual property to complete the sweep - drugs and Hollywood movies and U2. A weak dollar won’t bring back manufacturing jobs – with $20/hour manufacturing jobs in the U.S. vs. $2 in China, the dollar would have to drop an unlikely 90%. And why should we be encouraging low paying jobs in this country?

Foreigners buy our Treasury bonds they own 43% of them in effect so we don’t have to. Who wants 3% returns? We can and should own stocks of the high margin companies that benefit from this design vs. manufacturing divide. As we move to an intellectual property economy, our wealth will come from exporting our profitable designs and importing more finished goods. Its higher salaries and our stock market that balances this all out as those dollars flow back in. Of course, bean counters can’t find the money that flows into the stock market, it is just bean dip. $4+ trillion in trade deficits since 1976 has been matched by an $11 trillion increase in value of our stock market. That’s about all you have to know.

Plus, as Jack Nicholson might say, they can’t handle our dollars. Too many dollars in foreign central banks leads to over-lending by their banks to wasteful domestic companies. Japan is just emerging 15 years later from a non-performing loan hangover – China is face first in the punch bowl with potentially half their bank loans uncollectible. If their currency spikes, it might go to 100%.

Rather than debase our wallets, Japan and China and even Europeans have to buy dollar assets to keep their currencies from rising too much if they want to continue to sell us their industrial output, while of course, we get rich selling them the tools to do it productively. I’d suggest thanking Bono, er, Steve Jobs for the iPod economy.

Andy Kessler is the author of Running Money (HarperBusiness, 2004)

-- posted by Bill_Duffy

» phil_d - Hot Commodities, by Jim Rogers

Does it make sense to have a small allocation in a diversified, unleveraged, commodity index mutual fund?

-- posted by phil_d

» SCoe46 - Retirement investing?

Seb...

-- posted by SCoe46

» Kirk - Re: Retirement investing?

Interested in the top 1 or 2 books to read for a person just entering retirement. Looking for information covering proper stock/bond allocations, safe withdrawl rates and investing for income. Seb...

That is easy. Here are my top two:

1. The Lazy Person's Guide to Investing by Paul Farrell: Critical Praise

2. The Four Pillars of Investing : Lessons for Building a Winning Portfolio by William J. Bernstein
   “A Triumph! It is my candidate for the best investment book of 2002.”
   ---- John Bogle, founder of the Vanguard Group.

I'd start with #1 since it is the easiest to read and follow.

Kirk

 
                  Kirk  S&P500  NASDAQ  BRKA
2YR: 12/31/2002   +69%   +41%    +63%   +23%
4YR: 12/31/2000   +35%    -3%    -12%   +26%
6YR: 12/31/1998  +160%     7%     -1%   +27% 

Compound Annual Return from 12/31/98 to 12/31/04 is 17.2%
Compound Annual Return from 12/31/02 to 12/31/04 is 30.0%
BKRa is Legendary Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway 

• Click for a free issue of my newsletter
  
• Suitable for the aggressive growth part of your diversified investment portfolio.

Even if you don’t market time or buy individual stocks, my newsletter offers quite a bit of useful information and tables (Discussion of interest rates, The Fed Model, etc.) which many say are worth the price of the subscription on its own.

Support Suite101 and Buy TurboTax Deluxe 2004 Win/Mac

-- posted by Kirk

» bob90245 - Re: Retirement investing?

Hi Seb,

IMHO, no really good book exists. At least none that I've read. That's why I've started the thread Retire at the Coffeehouse. My source material comes from what I posted here.

These three books make a good attempt at the subject. But I would only give them a luke-warm endorsement.

The Grangaard Strategy: Invest Right During Retirement by Paul A. Grangaard

Plan Right for Retirement With the Grangaard Strategy by Paul A. Grangaard

Buckets of Money : How to Retire in Comfort and Safety by Raymond J. Lucia

-- posted by bob90245

» SCoe46 - Re: Re: Retirement investing?

In response to Re: Retirement investing? posted by bob90245:

-- posted by SCoe46

» Normxxx - British boy wonder

By Del Jones, USA TODAY | Fri Mar 4, 6:19 AM ET

There's no way Marcus Buckingham should have climbed to the top of the business guru heap.

He's 39. Too little mileage to be taken seriously.

He's British. Americans typically don't turn to Brits for expertise on business leadership. Brits don't even listen to Brits on this topic, "preferring to import U.S. optimism," he says. The best-selling books he has co-authored:

<img align="left" src="http://images.amazon.com/images/P/0684852861.01._PIdp-schmooS,TopRight,7,-26_SCMZZZZZZZ_.jpg" border="0"> First, Break all the Rules
by Marcus Buckingham, Curt Coffman

<img align="left" src="http://images.amazon.com/images/P/0743201140.01._PIdp-schmooS,TopRight,7,-26_SCMZZZZZZZ_.jpg" border="0"> Now, Discover Your Strengths
by Marcus Buckingham, Donald O. Clifton

-- have sold better in India than in the United Kingdom.

The main reason Buckingham is an unlikely candidate to be a management sage is his stammer. Reaching the top of the business guru game requires fresh ideas, popular books - and the ability to get standing ovations as a high-priced orator.

But Buckingham, who advises the rest of us not to waste time overcoming weaknesses, overcame the dominant weakness of his life to become the hottest star in the lucrative guru game. Last year he gave 45 speeches at $55,000 each, which comes to nearly $2.5 million. That puts him in a league with Jim Collins, Jason Jennings and Tom Peters, and he is approaching celebrities who also do the leadership circuit including Rudy Giuliani, Norman Schwarzkopf, Colin Powell (news - web sites) and Terry Bradshaw.

The books Buckingham co-wrote with Curt Coffman and mentor Don Clifton of the Gallup Organization have sold a combined 2 million worldwide. Publishers keep book sales a guarded secret, but the list of business authors who have outsold Buckingham over five years includes few others than parable king Spencer Johnson (Who Moved My Cheese?) and get-rich authority Robert Kiyosaki (Rich Dad, Poor Dad).

On Tuesday, Buckingham launches the first book he has written alone,

<img align="left" src="http://images.amazon.com/images/P/0743261658.01._PIdp-schmooS,TopRight,7,-26_SCMZZZZZZZ_.jpg" border="0"> The One Thing You Need to Know : ... About Great Managing, Great Leading, and Sustained Individual Success
by Marcus Buckingham

It audaciously cuts to the bone to tell managers, leaders and those who want to sustain individual success the one thing they need to know.

Today it takes a careful ear to catch Buckingham's stammer behind the accent, sense of humor and 6-foot-tall movie star looks. But 26 years ago, before he turned 13, it was debilitating.

Boyhood friend Stephen Kendell, who runs a small hedge fund in London, says Buckingham was such a natural athlete and student that, despite his stammer, he was the perfect child. "He was one of those kids you shouldn't have liked."

Buckingham's perspective differs. "The stammer was the last thing I thought about when I went to sleep and the first thing when I woke up," he says, and only cricket and field hockey saved his self-confidence. "If you can hit the winning run, you can get away with a lot of other imperfections."

Though it might seem Buckingham would have to conquer his stammer to take the stage, it was actually the stage that proved the antidote. His nickname BAAAAAAAAHkingham had long been in cement when one day - he remembers it exactly as June 14 - the headmaster of Edge Grove School in the county of Hertfordshire selected him to speak at chapel to the student body of 300. It had taken him 20 minutes to plow through a few sentences at rehearsal, and the students settled in for an exhibition painful to watch.

He sailed through it in four minutes without a flaw, making the discovery that his stammer vanished in front of large audiences. "My vocal chords could separate, my breath could come out," and he was soon visualizing crowds of 300 when he spoke to chums on the schoolyard.

It was a life-altering event. "My friends think it's the funniest thing in the world that I speak for a living," Buckingham says.

And it's been a nice living. Even in 1999 before First, Break all the Rules was published, Buckingham was commanding $5,000 for a one-hour speech. Now, he turns down two $55,000 offers for each that he accepts, and he has to interrupt a press interview to deal with confusion over a speech in Houston that has been double booked by Wal-Mart and Sam's Club.

"He is probably the best speaker that I've ever seen," says Mark French, president of speaker bureau Leading Authorities. "He's able to connect with an audience in a way that is very rare."

'Throw-up nervous'

Buckingham's secret to individual success is to figure out what you don't like to do and stop doing it. But, as he flies aboard a leased private jet from Van Nuys, Calif., to Las Vegas to speak to 525 Charles Schwab branch managers, he seems to be ignoring his own advice. He says he gets "throw-up nervous" before every speech, and that's when he smokes his only two or three cigarettes of the day. But getting nervous isn't one of those things that you should stop doing, he says. What people must shun aren't workplace tasks that are difficult, but those that drain them of energy.

"The point is to feel authentic, self-assured or creative," he says.

Too much research is wasted studying those who do things wrong, he says. Marriage counselors study divorce. "We study addicts to learn how to keep kids off drugs," he says.

Performance appraisals focus on "areas of opportunity, which is a nice way of saying stuff you don't do well. We think good is the opposite of bad. If you invert bad you get not bad. That's different than good."

Buckingham's 17-career at Gallup was spent studying people who did their jobs extraordinarily well. He discovered the power of an open-ended question. For example, you don't ask secretaries if they're organized, but rather: "How do you feel about unfinished work?" There are several justifiable answers to that question, but organized people will always answer "I hate it." Looking for employees with a competitive streak? Ask applicants if they are good losers. They may say they are gracious losers, but they will never say they are good losers, he says.

Gallup assigned Buckingham to Orlando in 1994 to manage the Walt Disney account. He learned that there are people hard-wired for every job, certain people who excel at jobs others would disdain, such as time-share salesmen or housekeepers.

"Most people think housekeeping is boring, but when you hear the best housekeepers talk about it, you realize how rich it is," Buckingham said. "The best housekeepers will lay on the bed and turn on the fan because they know that is the first thing guests do after a long day at the theme park."

Before Buckingham arrived, Disney used the "Ken and Barbie" hiring strategy, looking for people who looked good in a theme park rather than people who had the talent for it, says Todd Mansfield, who was Disney's executive vice president for real estate at the time. Before long, Disney was asking Buckingham, still in his 20s, for input on new theme park rides and other areas way beyond his expertise. He could have been a creative producer at Disney, Mansfield says.

The ultimate goal is to have "engaged" employees, a word that is teetering on cliché in the human resources field. There are plenty of definitions, but to Buckingham "engaged" boils down to being so involved in your work that you lose track of time and forget your troubles. Busy, but not stressed-out busy. It's "the zone," and Gallup research has found that 60% of workers fail to experience it even once a week, he says.

During his Disney assignment Buckingham learned that he disliked being a manager as much as he hated practicing the trombone as a child. Managing a group of employees was the most draining experience of his career.

There was one bright spot. He met his wife, Jane Rinzler, a native New Yorker who at 16 wrote Teens Speak Out and turned it into a company that sniffed out the buying trends of teens and preteens; 60 Minutes and Good Morning America turn to her when they need a teen expert.

Married in 1996, the Buckinghams have two children, Jackson, nearly 4, and Lilia, almost 2. Also, two cats, Bali and Abigail, blaze trails along the kitchen counter in their Beverly Hills home, proof that little effort at this home goes into fixing the weaknesses of the hard-wired.

Fan of the heartland

Despite his name, Buckingham has no royal roots. But he is firmly British, a Cambridge graduate whose brother, sister, divorced parents and friends are all in England. He says "cheers" and the like, but has embraced America, especially all things heartland, since 1984 when he flew to Chicago, took a bus to Nebraska and stepped from the Greyhound and into an alien land of 104-degree heat to be a Gallup intern.

He's been to places like Devils Tower in Wyoming. He likes campfire music and barbecue and marching bands and Omaha steaks. He says he hasn't the time to read fiction, yet rarely misses American Idol, Extreme Makeover Home Edition and other reality TV that doesn't thrive on back-biting and derogation. He likes to brag that he spotted Justin Timberlake as a rising star before his trend-expert wife did, although Jane brought home TiVo (news - web sites) one day and Marcus stuck it in the basement as a dumb invention.

He's a rabid University of Nebraska football fan dating back to his days with Gallup. There's no immunity from Cornhusker mania, not even to cricket players who parachute into Lincoln, Neb., from Radlett, England. "What exactly is an ineligible receiver downfield? How did he get there? Is he a good thing or a bad thing?"

Nebraska was "big and extreme," a place where thunderheads roll in like ships, he says. America is vast and uplifting and full of choices, he says. "In England they ask, 'Are you hungry?' In America, or at least in Lincoln, they ask, 'What are you hungry for?' I love the idea that there is Mexican and Chinese and different kinds of burgers. I love being asked: 'What are you hungry for?' "

But as he rides in a limousine heading for his Charles Schwab speech, he looks out at the Las Vegas Strip and says he is no fan of a city where most go home losers. He prefers Beverly Hills, where at last count his home had seven iPods, nine computers and 10 TVs.

"In England the streets are small, the cars are small, the dreams are small. I could not have done in the UK what I have done here."

-- posted by Normxxx

» Normxxx - Trend Following Is No Panacea

By Peter Deoteris | 24 March 2005

Editor's Note: I am often sent investment books, more than any sane woman could possibly read. Only a few, happily, appear to deserve more than a cursory look. Those, however, easily bring on the guilts. Case in point: Michael Covel's recently published "Trend Following.” Its bold cover promises to reveal how great traders make fortunes in good markets and bad. How could I not read that? But when would I have time to do it justice? That’s when inspiration struck and I prevailed on someone much better qualified than I to assess the book’s virtues, one of my Weeden partners, consummate trading pro and closet intellectual Peter Deoteris. His piquant analysis follows—KMW

<img align="left" src="http://images.amazon.com/images/P/0131446037.01._PIdp-schmooS,TopRight,7,-26_SCMZZZZZZZ_.jpg" border="0"> "Trend Following, How Great Traders Make Millions in Up or Down Markets"
by Michael Covel

As market analysis books go, Michael Covel's recently-published, "Trend Following, How Great Traders Make Millions in Up or Down Markets," is not an especially difficult read. And there undoubtedly are newbie or casual students of the market who will find his stories about some of the successful traders he profiles interesting.

Professional traders and serious market followers, however, are likely to find, as I did, that Covel's anecdotes and the philosophies of the "billionaire traders" he recounts are entirely too reminiscent of earlier market books. I am thinking, in particular, of Jack D. Schwager's "Market Wizards," first published more than 15 years ago.

Covel is clearly enamored of a couple of commodities traders in particular. So many of his stories and quotes came from John Henry and Ed Seykota, as well as from their assistants and colleagues. His faith in their "trend following" systems becomes almost evangelical at points, though. Indeed, it seems he takes every word from their lips as gospel, and at times the book degrades into a paean to their successes. John Henry, in particular, clearly impresses the author, though it's not at all clear that Henry's trading acumen is the principal reason for Covel's adoration. Baseball seems a more likely explanation. Covel, the book's jacket notes, is "a lifelong baseball fan. Henry, of course, is the owner of the Red Sox. Covel even goes so far as to compare Henry's strict trading system to the baseball system described in the 2003 bestseller, "Moneyball" a strict, non-human interactive, rating system employed by Oakland A's general manager, Billy Beane.

<img align="left" src="http://images.amazon.com/images/P/0393324818.01._PIdp-schmooS,TopRight,7,-26_SCMZZZZZZZ_.jpg" border="0"> Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game
by Michael Lewis

Other successful traders are quoted and profiled by Covel, however, including Richard Dennis, Bill and Daniel Dunn, Richard Neiderhoffer and Jerry Parker.

The book's main value, it seems to me, resides in the way it highlights the apparent contradictions inherent in the personalities and skill sets of all top traders, regardless of the system they use. A good trader must be a risk-taker, willing to take a bigger than normal position when he feels he is correct--yet he must also be disciplined enough to recognize and take losses quickly. The traders in the book speak of being right in only 40% of their trades, but allowing their profits to ride, and to overcome the 60% that are losses or breakeven. A good trader can differentiate volatility from risk, when by definition they can be synonymous. Traders must have passion for their market, but must also have the patience not to trade. Covel cites several personal histories illustrating that wives, children and normal lives frequently don't mesh well, if at all, with devotion to the market. Yet his stories also demonstrate that top traders need stability and discipline in their everyday lives. You must be informed about every event potentially affecting your market, yet never too emotional or too quick to react to news. Intelligence is paramount but "emotional intelligence" is even more important. Decisions should be emphatic and quickly made, usually relying on first instinct. But the fewer decisions, the better (Occam's razor).

One eye-catching part of the book is Covel's theory that significant world events were all foreshadowed in the markets, and essentially, therefore, were profit opportunities. The Asian debt collapse, the Long-Term Capital Management debacle, the 9/11 terrorist disaster, etc., he maintains were all predicted in some fashion by some super wizards. What's more, since he believes trading is a zero-sum game, Covel asserts they were all profitable for someone. The traders profiled clearly granted Covel unusually extensive access to trading performance records, and so the book is illustrated with numerous tables "demonstrating" his guys' impressive performance in times of crisis. While there is no reason to doubt that Covel accurately reports the statistics he was given, there clearly is a strong element of revisionist history at work here. Covel is looking back and using subsequent events to justify various traders' positions. When those positions were established, however, they were based on logic and assumed risks that were often entirely different.

The book's central conceit is the supposed superiority of the trading system Covel calls "trend following," which is contrary to much of traditional investment theory. A trend-following system encourages the trader to enter a market at breakout points, buying positions only after a breakthrough to a new high, and selling them after a commodity, bond, or stock breaks down to a new low. The stark contrast to the traditional advice to "buy low, sell high" couldn't be more obvious. Covel quotes one of Paul Tudor Jones' famous maxims, "Losers average losers," to bolster his argument. But trend-following theory essentially rests on the assumption that any set of fundamentals strong enough to create a defined movement in a security will lead to a prolonged period of advances or declines in that security-and, therefore, that there's greater potential for profit in capturing the majority of a defined trend than there is in attempting to guess when it will reverse.

The John Henry simplification of this theory recounted in Covel's tome involves the way that the Fed has historically handled changes in the Fed Funds rate. In other words, that the pattern has always been "raise, raise, raise, raise" or "lower, lower, lower, lower." But never "raise, raise, lower, raise, lower." In a purely academic sense, trend trading makes enormous sense. That's because a confident and competent trader is assumed to let profits run while identifying a misread of the trend quickly enough to cut losses long before they become overwhelming. Experience informs, however, that in practice that is one whale of an assumption.

And that, alas, is the core issue that Covel's book fails utterly to address, at least to this trader's satisfaction. Just what is it-in terms of length or breadth or any other definable variable--that differentiates a trend worthy of following from any of any of the myriad of just normal trading fluctuations a trader encounters daily? This omission is especially irritating because the author is constantly quoting dictums from the "wizards" he interviewed to the effect that it's crucial to resist the temptation to be in the market at all times. Their first commandment, it seems, is "Thou shalt enter and exit positions only a few times a year, when trends become evident."

Nice work if you can get it. But you know where I am 60 hours a week!

Don't get me wrong, as an investment read, "Trend Following" is not at all horrible. The casual investor may even find it fantastically revelatory. I just hope our institutional clients know better.

Senior trader Peter Deoteris is one of the maestros who work market magic on Weeden's trading desk.

The content of this letter/report does not necessarily reflect the opinions or viewpoint of normxxx. They are provided for informational/educational purposes only.

The content of this message is not to be construed as constituting market or investment advice. It is intended for educational purposes only. Individuals should consult with their own advisors for specific investment advice.

-- posted by Normxxx

» SteveT - Beating the Business Cycle

Beating the Business Cycle
By Lakshman Achuthan and Anirvan Banerji

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0...

I’ve been following the work of the Economic Cycle Research Institute since shortly after Y2K. Those of you curious how ECRI uses Leading indicators would, in my opinion definitely benefit from owning this book. I found it very well suited to us lay economists. It is entertaining enough to hold your attention on topics many people find dull yet informative enough to clarify and teach. It progresses to the final chapter leaving the reader with a basic understanding of how they can apply this new found knowledge to their own unique set of circumstances in the real world. I might add it is not often you find a book with such an extensive bibliography.

It begins with a brief history of past attempts at predicting economic cycles and why they didn’t achieve the desired effect. No two economic cycles are identical. Dr. Geoffrey H. Moore discovered they do however, follow consistent sequences of events around turning points. The intensity is more pronounced the farther it gets away from the consumer so the key is to properly weigh a diverse set of durable indicators that work in all free markets. This avoids being tricked by attribution bias, the tendency to take credit for good outcomes while blaming others for bad outcomes. Persistence bias, the tendency to think past performance will continue is also a problem. Objective tools avoid these types of mistakes.

In the late 1950s, Dr. Geoffrey Moore and colleagues developed the Index of Leading Economic Indicators (LEI). This breakthrough is a composite index. This method essentially allows the adding of apples and oranges by finding common threads that works in the various countries and cultures. From this beginning further research was done and methods refined to what is today over one hundred indexes that work well in free markets around the world despite differing cultures and economic drivers. ECRI is independent and funded through subscriptions to their services. They are not pressured from benefactors to make a biased decisions.

The book goes into minor details on a few of the indicators used without revealing enough proprietary information to allow readers to construct their own system. Lakshman, when time allows posts information and answers some questions here. http://www.suite101.com/discussion.cfm/i...

ECRI does offer a reasonable subscription called ERCI Light for $99.00 per year. Each Friday morning at 10am (ET) you receive Recession-Recovery Watch, their view on where we are in the U.S. business cycle, and in which direction growth and inflation are likely to head in coming months. A sample is available. http://www.businesscycle.com/pdf_samples...

I feel it would be most beneficial to first read the book before subscribing to give you a better understanding on how to apply the data.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0...

-- posted by SteveT

» bob90245 - Paul Merriman's new book

-- posted by bob90245