Praise for Wall Street’s Buried Treasure “Mr. Houtkin has provided the reader with a wonderful education on a great strategy that has the potential to turn a very limited risk investment into an extraordinarily high return. He makes the critical distinction between penny stocks and serious opportunities available to the low-priced value investor using important examples of his own methodology. Along the way, Houtkin provides valuable insight into some of the inner working…
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This book has three messages, repeated endlessly throughout:
1) Wall Street is full of sharks that can’t be trusted (big surprise to us all)
2) Yahoo! Finance and other free web sites provide a great deal of useful information (another shocker); he doesn’t help you to understand how to make use of this information though
3) The upside potential of low-priced stocks is greater than that of higher-priced stocks, which is probably intuitively obvious to most people.
The author also enjoys regaling the reader with tales of his many exploits in the world of investing in a very self-aggrandizing way, and there is little if anything in these stories which could be of use to the ordinary reader. For example, because of the author’s connections in the industry, he is able to call CFOs and CEOs on the telephone to ask them about important developments in their businesses or confusing aspects of their financial reports, and he blythely advises his reader to do the same. Right; I’m sure I’d have no trouble getting through. Also, because of his wealth, he is able to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars at a time in companies he believes have potential and doesn’t worry overly about the risk of loss of his capital; most of us don’t have that luxury. Overall the book was a great disappointment and I wish I hadn’t wasted my time and money on it.
Have to agree with previous reviewer in panning this dog. I have no idea why it was published other than some sort of ego-trip for the author. It seems that the basic premise here is that a high-priced stock can fall from 100 to 25, so if that’s a possibility, you might as well invest in complete lottery ticket penny stocks as they can easily climb from 25 cents to $5.00. Yes, it’s true that penny stocks or low-priced stocks are more volatile than your typical mid or high cap stock and the possible reward is greater, but in the meantime, how many of these penny stocks will go to zero while you wait for your ten-bagger? Let’s not even bring up the bid-ask spread on these nano-cap black holes. In fact, do yourself a favor if you are tempted to follow the ‘advice’ in this book. Just buy a lottery ticket instead. At least you’ll know within minutes or days that you’ve lost your money instead of the agonizing months it will take after buying the type of stocks Mr. Houtkin was gambling on….