I was going to write an individual post reviewing in depth each of the six books listed below. But since I’m a bad citizen and have given in to the fact that I will never find enough time to do so, I’m going to give a quick review for each of them here. So in the order I’ve read them…

Included are reviews of:

• The Real Estate Coach by Bradley J. Sugars.
• Become the CEO of You, Inc. by Susan Bulkeley Butler
• Built to Last by Jim Collins and Jerry I. Porras
• Finding the Hot Spots by David Riedel
• Jim Cramer’s Mad Money - Watch TV, Get Rich by James J. Cramer with Cliff Mason
• The Only Three Questions That Count by Ken Fisher

TheBuyList.com is a nice, simple website with just one purpose: to show you if mutual funds are trading the stocks you’re tracking.

Just enter a ticker and click a button. You’ll be shown a table of “recent” transactions of that stock made by “the top rated mutual funds”. The table shows you how many shares were bought or sold, the name and ticker of the fund, and the general “family” of fund.

Wiley is trying to turn their hit Little Book that Beats the Market (discussion, Amazon.com) into a series: Little Book Big Profits. The second book in the series, The Little Book of Value Investing, is written by Christopher H. Browne and focused on value investing.

While Browne obviously has the pedigree and experience to write a book on value investing, the lack of practical examples ruins the potential of the book. The basics of the value investing philosophy are presented well and in a way that is easy to read. However, the author seems more interested in convincing the reader into buying into value-based mutual funds than teaching us how to become value investors on our own. The book would be good for current value investors looking for more arguments against market timing and day trading strategies. Aspiring value investors will have to go elsewhere for instruction, though The Little Book of Value Investing may be a good, light start for readers new to the concept of value investing.

It doesn’t have to get all hot and heavy and technical here on InvestorGeeks all the time! If you tell me an investor with good temperament needs a serious attitude every second, I’ll counter that by saying sometimes you really need to let loose and have fun! Even Warren Buffett gets crazy once in a while; even if his idea of crazy fun may be playing a ukelele, playing bridge or eating Dairy Queen ice-cream.

Investing should be an enjoyable experience, perhaps even fun for you! This is NOT the first time that InvestorGeeks have reviewed sites that try to bring to fun into stock picking with social websites. But I don’t believe my fellow InvestorGeeks have reviewed Motley Fools CAPS; which I believe is on the right track to injecting some fun into a mundane task.

What a treat for investors or business owners! I wish I had this book when I started my first business - it would have certainly sped up my learning process at the time. And for investors who want a good solid background on reading financial statements, it’s hard to imagine a better introduction.

By the time I was 20 years of age I knew about Benjamin Graham, Warren Buffett and Philip Fisher and was a big fan of Malcolm Forbes Sr.. I would do spreadsheets by hand and can you believe it on paper! It was not until 1990 that I converted to my first PC so I had a good 15 years of reading books in order to learn my trade.

Howard Lindzon “smells a rat” at TheMoneyBlogs.com:

I called Brice (owner of TheMoneyBlgs), who picked up his own phone and asked him some questions. I immediately smelled a rat. Trading Markets will take my content and brand it in moneyblog design and keep all the advertising dollars from the aggregated data.

I love blogging and don’t mind doing it for free, but this is just plain sneaky.

If you run an investing, personal finance, business, or “money” blog, you’ve probably gotten an email from Brice Wightman of TheMoneyBlogs.com. InvestorGeeks got one, and we initially signed up since we’re proud of the relationship we have with a similar service pfblogs.org. But once we found that TheMoneyBlogs would not include a link back to our site the original article, we immediately removed ourselves from their network.

So how can you make these aggregators work for you? Find out how some people are trying to make TheMoneyBlogs work them. More importantly, I’ll go through some questions you can ask yourself to determine up front if a blog aggregator is really offering a win-win situation.

Chapter 8 on “Spotting Bottoms in Stocks” is one of the best sections of Jim Cramer’s Real Money. The chapter is filled with the type of insights you would expect to get from someone with 25 years of experience in the market.

The chapter does discuss spotting bottoms in individual stocks, but Jim spends most of his time on indicators he uses to spot market bottoms. These indicators (collected into three categories) have been shared by all four of the last big market bottoms (1987, 1990, 1998, and the “double bottom” in 2002-2003).

I was recently disappointed because I couldn’t purchase the Mairs & Power Growth Fund (MPGFX) or Artisan International Fund (ARTIX) through my T. Rowe Price Roth IRA. After doing some sleuthing on Morningstar I discovered I could purchase both of these funds through TD Ameritrade, from whom I have a standard brokerage account.

I was ready to transfer all my assets over from TRP to TD Ameritrade and it turned out that transferring a Roth IRA was extremely bothersome. So instead of jumping into anything I thought I had better check to see if there was another discount broker that offered more funds, because I didn’t want to have to do this again. I spent some time at it, and put together a screen using the Morningstar Premium Fund Screener (more info) that would show the number of funds each major discount broker had available, and which funds were covered by all of them. The results were fascinating.

By far the most useful single page in Jim Cramer’s Real Money: Sane Investing in an Insane World is the “Cyclical Investing and Trading” chart on page 115.

Visually the chart looks like a W. It follows the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth rate through an economic cycle. The chart also depicts the Federal Reserve’s standard response of either raising (tightening) or lowering (easing) interest rates based on GDP growth. The chart has no explicit relation to time, but these cycles typically take about 7 years or so.

The meat of the chart is Cramer’s suggestions for which types of stocks (or sectors) to buy based on where we are on the chart. So where are we right now?