The Investor's Free Internet - Extracts

The following extracts are taken from "The Investor's FREE Internet" to give you a sense of the contents of the guide.

Section 1, Page 1 – Introduction

This section has three chapters. They are devoted to introducing:

• this guide
• FIFTI 
• investing in the U.S. stock market.

FIFTI™ is the acronym for Free Information from the Internet, but FIFTI™ from InvestorsInternet.com is more than that. FIFTI™ is an organized way of finding, selecting, synthesizing and using free information from the Internet.

Chapter 1 describes the objectives of this guide, the intended audience, the structure and the content. This is a reference guide, not a novel to be read cover to cover. The best place for this guide is alongside the personal computer or workstation used for investing. It is not a list of Internet sites, the likes of which can be found online in many places.  This guide is structured around what an investor needs to know, the investing process, and the information needed to make wise decisions.   

Chapter 2 introduces FIFTI. It describes how to use FIFTI™ for investing. FIFTI™ is used to provide investor education and support an investing process. The investor needs to know what free information related to investing is available on the Internet, and how to organize that information to make more profitable investments. This chapter serves as a guide to the following sections that fill in the details for using FIFTI. It provides an overview that will enable the reader to peruse the chapters with a greater sense of purpose because of an understanding of the organization of FIFTI.

Chapter 3 provides information about the basics of investing for new investors. It looks at the probability of new investors losing money until they have sufficient patience, discipline and money management skills to apply the lessons that FIFTI™ provides. It identifies the information the new investor needs to know and where to find it online.  

Chapter 1, Page 5 - How This Guide Is Structured

The main content of this guide is structured into three sections. There is a section on education for investors, and sections on each of the two phases of the FIFTI™ investing process. The first of the two is a section on planning investments and the second on making investments.  The process progresses from a long time frame to a short one and from a big picture of the stock market to the detail of an individual investment.

This guide promotes developing an understanding of investing, by building knowledge through education in and experience of planning and making investments. It describes the FIFTI™ that supports education, planning and making investments. This guide cannot give you experience, knowledge and understanding. The relationships are illustrated in Diagram 1.2.

Diagram 1.2 – The Process Basis for This Guide

Chapter 1, Page 10 - Information and Data

In the authors’ experience, all too often business executives are data rich and information poor. Investors suffer from the same problem. There is a difference between data and information, and it is necessary to understand the meanings we apply to the words “data” and “information.” Information is defined here as meaningful data. Or, to put it the other way around, data is information that has no value.

Chapter 2, Page 18

The authors encourage supplementing FIFTI™ with valuable information for which a fee is paid, but the authors hate to see fees paid for information that turns out to be of little value to the investor. The authors also encourage the experts to provide some free information and encourage investors to subscribe to those sites that are obviously interested in providing long-term value to subscribers. Using FIFTI™ is not the only route to successful investing.

Chapter 2, Page 23

Learning from an Internet site, or a book, is no substitute for live education from an experienced teacher or coach, but it can be useful to:

• learn the basics of a subject so that the live education is more useful.
• consolidate the lessons learned in our mind without having to redo a live course.
• educate us about esoteric topics, for which live education is difficult to find.
• contain the cost of education – the education in all the sites referenced in this guide is free.
• reference topics that we have partly forgotten.
• determine which teacher or coach to employ.

Chapter 2, Page 24

FIFTI™ organizes the information for education into five topics:

• Understanding Investors. That includes understanding ourselves as well as the mass psychology of other people investing.
• Business Analysis, which includes analysis of the economic, political and social environment in which businesses operate and the analysis of public companies, including their past performances and their future prospects.
• Market Analysis, meaning analysis of the U.S. stock market, its sectors, Exchange Traded Funds and the influences of related markets.
• Technical Analysis, which is the major tool of the frequent investor.
• Other Investing Methods. This covers additional well known methods that investors use. It does not attempt to cover the hundreds of proprietary methods promoted by individual Internet sites. 

Chapter 2, Page 28 - Static and Dynamic Information

Information has traditionally been organized in hierarchical, relational and object oriented structures. This works reasonably well when information is viewed as a static or near-static resource. ………………………….

……… The traditional view is fine for the purpose of education, where information is relatively static. However, it is not well suited to the process of investing in the stock market. The process of investing requires a stream of dynamic, or transient, information. ……..

………….. Organization is the key to successful management of process information.  One of the main occupations of successful investors is research. Researching potential investments takes a lot of time. Having information organized saves time and enables better investments to be made.

Section 3, Page 131 – Using Weekly FIFTI™ To Plan Investments

After gaining an education from Section 2 we shall use a two-part process for investing. We shall plan our investments and then make them - sometimes called “planning the investment and investing in the plan”. FIFTI™ will provide the information we need for this process. ……..

………… ………..  FIFTI™ will provide us with the planning information we need - free news, articles, reports, price quotes, charts, indicators and experts’ opinions - as shown in the last three chapters in this section.

Chapter 10, Page 141

For any business project there is usually a set of key success factors, or criteria, against which the feasibility of an investment is judged. Typically these criteria include the business environment, timescale for the project, return on investment, size of investment, degree of risk, use of management time, effect on the company and other factors. Executives may give weightings to these factors and score alternative projects against each factor. The project with the highest weighted score progresses to the next stage.

A similar criteria and process can be used for the business of investing....

Section 4, Page 201 - Using Daily FIFTI™ To Make Investments

Using the previous sections of this guide we have been able to gain an education and plan our investments. The objective now is to make investments in those stocks in our plan that continue to satisfy our criteria. This is the second part of “planning the investment and investing in the plan.”  FIFTI™ will provide the information we need to make investments.

Chapter 14, Page 213

In the previous section we used weekly FIFTI™ to plan our investments. In this section we move a step further down the path from the big picture to the detail of making the investment. For this we need daily information – before the market opens, during the market day, and after the market closes.

When we were using weekly FIFTI™ for planning, the emphasis was on investing in line with the next larger time frame and on developing a deeper understanding of the business climate, the market environment and potentially suitable stocks. Now that we have a plan from that process, our emphasis is on making the investment. We are looking to optimize our entry and exit points. The focus is more on shorter-term news and views.

Section 5, Page 267 – Conclusion

This section concludes our attempt to show what free information is available from the Internet, where it is and how to use it. Much information, whether free or not, is low-value information. We therefore have to divide our time between gathering information and selecting from it the information that is of high-value to us, and synthesizing high-value information from the low-value information we have gathered. In this guide the authors have tried to direct the reader to sources of high-value information so that time spent gathering, selecting and synthesizing can be minimized.