Sunday, September 15, 2013

Standard and Poor's 500 Guide 2013



Saving some time, here's the review I posted to Amazon a while back:

Back in the 80’s and 90’s when I was an economic development consultant in Japan, the Shikiho listing of company data was the go to source for information about companies in general. We used it to identify companies likely to perform strongly in the near future, and therefore likely to invest overseas, too. Obviously though, it also proved useful for identifying companies that might be good prospects in which to invest in general.

The Standard and Poor’s 500 Guide provides a lot of information that is very reminiscent of the Shikiho. I felt vaguely nostalgic flipping through the company explanations and financial summaries, reviewing the year to year performance of the stock price, P&L summary statements, earnings, dividend statements, and all the rest . The information contained in this book is very thorough and useful to a point. In this day and age, however, the Internet provides a number of resources to get more reliable and up to date information that would probably be of more value to most investors. Although it does provide buy, sell and hold recommendations, because this is Standard and Poor’s book of all 500 companies contained in their exchange, it does not offer much in the way of in depth analysis, but as a source of raw data for performing your own analysis, it is invaluable. You’ll just need to be prepared to provide your own investment strategy.

I’m very glad the publisher provided me a copy of this book gratis for this review, but I would say, the information contained is well worth the retail price. I rate this book as a “buy”.



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