The Neatest Little Guide to Stock Market Investing - Power Investor Review

To order The Neatest Little Guide to Stock Market Investing, please visit Amazon.com or your favorite bookstore. You can read more of Jason Kelly's writing at www.jasonkelly.com.

This is the software I use, and I love it. It's from the Investors Alliance, a nonprofit investment organization. A full year membership includes Power Investor, which alone justifies the cost of joining. You'll read more about Investors Alliance on page 179.

Power Investor covers 9,000 stocks, provides more information on each one than you'll find in U.S. Equities OnFloppy, ships on a single CD-ROM, and gives free unlimited updates over the modem. The cost? A mere $92 for a full year. When I first read about this deal, I didn't believe it. I assumed the software would be garbage. But the screen captures on the flier looked good, so I gave it a shot and it turned out to be the best stock database I've ever used. Its interface is more elegant than any other, its data more comprehensive, and its updates the most convenient. All I do is click a button, and the program dials over the modem, grabs the latest numbers, and hangs up. I can even schedule updates to happen unattended in the middle of the night when I'm in bed and phone rates are low. Whether I update the information every day, once a week, or once a month, I'm never charged extra.
 

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Barron's Review

"Software and more for Investors."

"Power Investor for Windows... is a superior fundamental analysis program and a great value because you get the fundamental data not only for 11,500 stocks, but also for 5,000 mutual funds."

"The strength of [Power Investor] is the tools it offers for fundamental analysis - an area that has lagged behind the really first-rate technical analysis programs available these days.Fundamental data for stocks on the CD-ROM include balance sheets, income and cash-flow statements, key financial ratios and information about management and the board of directors. You can seach the stock database by industry, geographical region, or financial performance. The mutual-fund database contains performance statistics for the life of each fund, and it can be searched by investment objective, fund family, or user-specified performance criteria... it also has some portfolio-tracking capability. You can store your own portfolio in the Power Investor database and update stock and mutual fund data through the Investors Alliance... so you're not restricted to quarterly updates."

"What's the bottom line? If you're going to join an association for the software, go with Investors Alliance and it's superior Power Investor package."