The School of Hard Stocks - How to Get Your Portfolio Back to Even
By David Sharek, portfolio manager, DavidSharek.com
GENRE: Business
WORDS: 57,446 with more than 100 descriptive charts and teaching tools

The School of Hard Stocks is a simple A to Z instruction guide on how to get your portfolio back to even. The 2008 bear market took many portfolios down 50% - requiring a double to get back to even. The School of Hard Stocks shows investors how to construct a stock portfolio with the potential to double in three-to-five years using very clear signals of What to Buy, When to Buy and When to Sell. The book is simple for novice investors to grasp yet packed with knowledge that grabs and keeps a sophisticated investor's attention.

David Sharek knows how to get portfolios back to even - he's done it before. During the 2000-2002 Bear Market many investors lost half of their money in the market. Needing a double to get people back to even, Sharek constructed the blueprint, The School of Hard Stocks, and executed the plan. During the next four years (2003-2006) Sharek's growth stock portfolios compiled a compounded return of 100.57% - as he got many client portfolios back to even. The icing on the cake came the subsequent year (2007) as Sharek used The School of Hard Stocks to grow stock portfolios an additional 42%, and beat the stock market (S&P 500) by 39%.

Just as Benjamin Graham's Security Analysis chronicled the stock market before and after the Stock Market Crash of 1929, David Sharek's The School of Hard Stocks focuses on the 1996 through 2005 period - the Bull Market of the late '90s, the tech crash of 2000 - and shows how easy it was to discover the new stock market winners of the 21st century like Google (GOOG), Baidu.com (BIDU), and Research in Motion (RIMM) before they made their big moves.

David Sharek had to learn stocks the hard way. He didn't go to Wharton, or get a job at Goldman Sachs. Instead, he made each mistake himself, losing his own money along the way. Disgruntled with the research Wall Street provided, he was determined to find out what really made a stock go up or down, then spent countless evenings researching the biggest stock market winners of the past, trying to spot trends - characteristics - the best stocks possessed. Sharek not only wanted to know what caused these stocks to take off to stratospheric heights, but also how he could find the future winners beforehand.

Eventually Sharek discovered the pattern or theme most superstar stocks possess. He uncovered secrets only the smartest minds in the money management business knew, ones they shrewdly kept to themselves. Those secrets are unlocked in The School of Hard Stocks, which took thousands of hours to research and six years to write. Sharek shows why Wal-Mart (WMT) was a no-brainer to buy during the 1970s, the sell signals Home Depot (HD) flashed at the top of the market in March 2000 as well as why it was obvious Microsoft (MSFT) was one of the best stocks to buy and hold in the 1980s. Excerpts of the book were published in the Growth Stock Newsletter and the Commercial Appeal, Memphis' predominant newspaper.

David Sharek is founder and CEO of DavidSharek.com, a leading stock research website and money management firm. From his office in Midtown Manhattan, Sharek produces proprietary stock research and manages stock portfolios for individuals on a fee-basis. For more, go to www.davidsharek.com and www.schoolofhardstocks.com.