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I figured that since I have been living in Seattle long enough it was about time that I got a membership through the Seattle Public Library. Seattle recently built a brand new library for downtown. From the outside it has this totally random shape made out of steel and glass. It really is more of a work of art than an actual building. Inside there are 9-10 different levels. The first 5 levels have a lot of seating and computer areas, as well as a lot of fiction novels. The remaining floors are the non-fiction. These floors spiral on an incline around the northern half of the building. It is a pretty clever idea, but the library can be a bit confusing to navigate. The following picture is what the Seattle Public Library looks like. You can find a nice little review of the library, as well as some other cool pictures here.

Anyway, I set up my account during my lunch break and set out to explore the library. I decided to go check out the books they had in the business/investing section. Those are in the 330’s in the dewey decimal system for those keeping track at home. Originally I wanted to join the library because I didn’t feel like paying $27 + tax for the Turtletrader book at Barnes and Noble. Unfortunately it is already checked out, but I am next in line for it.

It took me awhile to find the right section. I knew that I wanted to be in the 330’s, because it seemed like every other finance book started with 33x as well. I naturally assumed that the 3xx section would be on the third floor. Turns out I was wrong, and the third floor just had fiction books. I found a map that showed that the section that I needed to be in was actually on the 7th floor.

Once I finally found my section, I realized that I needed to find something fairly quickly if I were to be able to check it out and get back to work with enough time to eat some lunch as well. The library actually has a pretty decent selection of finance titles, and after a bit of searching I came along a couple that looked like winners.

The first book is called The EDGAR Online Guide to Decoding Financial Statements: Tips, Tools, and Techniques for Becoming a Savvy Investor. The book was written in 2004 by Tom Taulli, an EDGAR Online analyst. The book looks like it shows how to decipher the typical financial statement that is on the EDGAR website and how to make the most of it. For those of you who don’t know, EDGAR Online is a website run by the SEC which lists all of the financial releases of publicly traded companies.

The second book that I checked out is called How Technical Analysis Works by Bruce M. Kamich. After flipping through this book, it looks like it gives a nice overview of many of the different chart reading techniques. This should be an interesting read.

I have to return these books by March 24th, so hopefully that will give me enough time to take a decent look through them and possibly write a little review about each of them.

Random, Reviews, Stocks book, edgar online, kamich, reveiw, seattle public library, taulli, technical analysis

I was at Barnes and Noble earlier today when I came across a “new” book written by Suze Orman. Now when I say that the book is new, I mean that it is new to me. The book has actually been out since March of 2005, so it is actually about three years old. Nevertheless, the information that is inside does not really change from year to year. For those of us who do not know who Suze Orman is, she writes articles for Yahoo! Finance and also has her own show on CNBC called the Suze Orman Show. Her specialty is personal finance.The book that I found was called The Money Book for the Young, Fabulous & Broke. The book is geared towards the younger generation who is in their twenties up until their early thirties. It is most directed to those who have accumulated a pile of debt going through college, and now that they are out they are struggling to make ends meet with a low paying job, high cost of living and endless debt. Even if you aren’t hopelessly in debt, a younger person can find this book to be especially beneficial. In this book, Suze covers a variety of topics over the course of 10 chapters and 360 pages.

Here is a summary of the table of contents:

1. Know the score (Credit scores)
2. Career moves
3. Give yourself credit (Get the most out of credit cards)
4. Making the grade on student debt
5. Save up
6. Retirement rules
7. Investing made easy
8. Big ticket purchase: Car
9. Big ticket purchase: Home
10. Love and money

The thing that I really liked about this book when I was browsing through it was how simple the author makes things seem. Suze puts all her points into really simple terms that people can relate to and understand, even if they have never taken a finance class before. If you or someone you know is going through a financial rough patch, this could be really helpful to get them to understand where the best places would be to put their money. Currently you can buy this book for only $6.25 at Abebooks.com

Credit, Personal Finance, Reviews, Savings book, credit card, debt, finance, review, suze orman

Trading stocks can be tricky business. Just when you think that now is the time to get into a stock it goes down, and as soon as you decide to sell it goes up. I think we’ve all been there. The problem with trying to “time” the market yourself is that there can be a lot of human emotion involved. If a stock is just off its 52 week high, it can be easy to hang on to it thinking that it will rise back up to where it was. As the stock continues to drop, the investor continues to hold thinking again that it will go back up.

One of the best ways to try to time the market is by developing a strategy of when to get in and when to get out and sticking with it. A carefully devised plan is useless if you don’t stick to it. The website TradingSolutions.com
thinks that it may have come up with a system that can predict peaks and valleys in a stock’s trading pattern. In fact, they their system can predict price movement in forex, futures, mutual funds, and options. They say that by using neural networks, which is a way to analyze trading patterns in stock price data, they can predict the best times to be in and out of a stock. The company says that “a more effective way of using neural networks is to model what the best possible trading strategy would have been in the past and apply that strategy to your current trading.” Seems simple enough right? The user can even choose between over 250 different functions and technical indicators in order to sift through historical data, which will then be used to project the future.

The nice feature of their program is that you see how trading on a certain function or technical indicator would have performed over a certain period of time. By using this, you can see whether or not a certain stock trades in predictable patterns. On their website they give a great example of how trading based on their program can produce phenomenal results. One case study they use is trading Wells Fargo from 1/31/2007 - 1/31/2008. Throughout the one year period, the TradingSolutions system showed great results. If an investor had used the buy and hold strategy over this time period, they would have had a return of -5.10%. Using the TradingSolutions system, the return would have been +132.68%. This is probably a fairly extreme example, but it shows what their system can do.

Take a look at the following charts to see how these trades were executed.

The first chart shows all of the trading suggestions over the one year period. The second chart shows how the stock performed over the course of the year. The red chart shows the buy and hold strategy. The green chart shows the TradingSolutions strategy.

One thing to keep in mind though is that using this system requires that the stock be actively monitored and actively traded. In the Wells Fargo case study, the stock would have been traded 32 times over the course of the year, which averages out to about one trade every seven days. Assuming $10 a trade, that is $320 in commissions for the stock for the year. If you have a decent amount of money invested into the security, then it won’t matter too much, especially if you are getting a +132.68 return.

The system promises to be a miracle worker, but it doesn’t come cheap $995 will get you the most basic version that updates its’ buy/sell advice at the end of the day. For another $1000 you can see the buy/sell advice in real time. Don’t hang your heads just yet though, because TradingSolutions offers a free 30 day trial of their software. Feel free to check it out and see what kind of software some of the “big boys” may be using, and in the meantime it may give you a few decent trade suggestions in the process. Here is a link to the free download.

Reviews, Websites software, trading, tradingsolutions

Ok, ok. So I know I said that I was going to make this be a financial blog and here I am doing a product review for my very first blog. But hey, it’s late at night and I just wanted to put something simple up on the site.

A few years ago (2005) my absolutely terrible Dell (DELL) all in one printer finally gave up. Nevertheless, school carried on and I was forced to purchase a new printer. Generally before I make a fairly major purchase I like to research all of the available products to see the pros and cons of each one so that I can make an informed buying decision. In this circumstance I didn’t have a whole lot of time for research, and I soon found myself staring at the vast printer selection at the local Best Buy (BBY). It was at this point that I started to think about manufacturer specialties. I know that probably isn’t the correct terminology for what I am talking about, but you know what I am talking about. Essentially what this means is that you would not go to a Chinese restaurant and order a hamburger. Some people still do this, but you shouldn’t expect a Red Robin (RRGB) quality hamburger here. This is the same sort of reason why my Dell printer fell apart on me after a few years. Dell does not make printers. Dell makes computers. This printer was Dell’s version of the Chinese hamburger. After realizing this, I decided to buy a printer from a manufacturer who specialized in printers first and computers second.

Hewlett Packard (HPQ) has always been a printer company in my mind. Only recently have they started to make computers, and to be honest their computers are actually pretty good. I ended up finally going with the HP PSC 1510 All-in-One model. At the time I think I bought it for about $110. Since this is a few years and many prints after the fact, I feel that I can give a fairly accurate review of this model.

The 1510 is very sleek, stylish and compact. It fits nicely on my desk and doesn’t take up much room at all. My old Dell printer would have taken up half the desk! The printer as a whole is quite intuitive and friendly. The buttons are simple and easy to press. Print quality is excellent, and the $15-$20 cartridges seem to last quite some time as well. Since I have purchased this printer I have moved at least three times, and it still looks brand new out of the box.

I do have a few gripes about this model though. First of all, there are buttons on the outside of the printer for scanning. One would think that if you pressed the scan button it would scan, but it doesn’t. The power light just flashes a bunch of times and nothing happens. Instead, you have to go into the poorly designed HP program and go through a series of steps for each time that you want to scan something new. It does not work well at all. My other gripe with the printer is that every time it is plugged in it has to print a test sheet. This just seems like a waste of paper and ink to me. There should be a way to override this. Besides these two minor flaws, this is a great printer for the price and would definitely buy it again.

Ratings:

Appearance: 5/5

Value: 5/5

Ease of Use: 4/5

As a final note, the author does not have any monetary investment in Hewlett Packard, Red Robin, Best Buy or Dell at the time this article was written.

Reviews electronics, HP PSC 1510, Reviews