Unlike rules in the engineering disciplines that may stay true years after we left colleges, there is no universal rule in security valuation. Market values of stocks are influenced by too many factors.

However, to “Man on the street”, he always believe, to the contrary, it is easy to make money. He is ill-equipped and unprepared. He take advises from brokers and dealers, and traded as instructed. If he loses, he loses so quickly that he believe he can recover from it just as fast.

It is almost impossible to beat the market consistently, even by the professional, but “Man on the street” believes that nothing is as easy to making money from the stock market. He is destined to lose.

If so, why should we still invest in stock market? Stock market provides unparalleled liquidity and frequent valuation of the stock. At low cost, one can quickly realised profit or cut loss. It is the virtue of a stock market. We should learn to avoid pitfall and wishful thinking, and take advantages of what the market mechanism has to offer.

At the end, the author asserts,

“Therefore, the more one learns about them, the more chance he has to preserve something. It is like anything else in life. Only a few amass fortunes. Only a few become really competent professional man or achieve real success in any line of endeavor.”

The recent market turmoil makes me reflect on the time-tested investment wisdom as laid out in the book “The Battle for Investment Survival” by Gerald M. Loeb.

Absolutely old fashion money advise. But for someone like me who is not a professional trader and has limited appetite for risk, these advises are actually very practical. The underlying principles are sound and easy to understand.

I am going to write a few blogs on a few chapters of this book. First of all, they will serve as a kind of “note to self” for me. Hopefully they might make you interested in this book too.

I wrote a piece on mining the blog sphere for general sentiment of fear of recession, or the lack of it, back in September last year.

I revisited this subject, and surprise, surprise, here is the new set of figures:


It is just like economic data: it can be revised!

A bit of explanation of the table of data here: back in Sep ‘07, when I searched for total number of blog posts contained the word “Recession”, says, for 2007, Google reported that there are 133,933 article. (As shown in the column “#Post as of Sep 07”). The figure, obviously, indicated blog posts created from Jan 2007 to 5, Sep 2007 only.

When I repeated the same search, the number of blog posts of 2007 has actually gone down, event though the time covered is full four quarters. Could it be caused by Google changing their search algorithm again, or people are actually withdrawing their blogs?

Nonetheless, from the relative change in the number of posts we can see a general rise in the awareness of the recession (be it we are in it now or it is going to happen). In the first month of ‘08, the number of posts covering Recession is almost 4/5 of the total number in 2007.


(Seems like it is not easy to construct a table in blogger)