People tends to tunnel the world into what he hopes to be or what he believes, easily pick up those facts that corroborate his ideas while consciously or unconsciously ignore those evidences against what he believes.  That's what is called confirmation bias.  Investor Benjamin Graham used to say the market in the short run is like a voting machine but in the long run it's a weighting machine. The chartists or short-term traders's tendency to predict market's next move by analyzing trading data or some fundamental information like earning release in my view is just effortless. What happened on market just now either up or down is just that market happens to go up or down, it's just doesn't have to be this easy. In another words, if time machine can turn backward a few minutes and rerun market from that point, the market may not repeat itself since intepretations of same set of data would likely to be different the second time regardless of possible different information the market could have in.

Here is a question: How do we look at inside buy and inside sell? Some people used to get panic when they learned the company's inside selling report, while they feel very optimistic when there are insider buying filings from SEC. They think in a rush since insiders are selling the stocks, they must be permistic about the future of the company. If insiders are buying the stock they must think the company is undervalued. If insiders are permistic about the company, how can I be more confident to go against them?

There is logic loophole in this way of thinking. This is caused by confustion about thinking forward and backward. Insider selling is a fact or an effect. If we try to intepret the reason or the cause of this effect, we should think in backward, in a probability way. We can only infer that the money insides sellers are cashing in from market has more worthy thing to spend or invest to insider sellers themselves, which could buy a big house, own another intested business,  go to charitable fund or be permisstic about the company's prospect. The list can go on and on. Peter Lynch, the former manager of the Magellan Fund,  just ignored the inside selling and has noted that insiders might sell their shares for any number of reasons. You need to combine other facts of the company to interpret the meaning of the inside selling activities. That's the right way of thinking, in a probability and backward way.

I’ve been reading with my new kindle 2 e-reader for one year. I pre-ordered it when Amazon announced it started to accept online booking. The reason is simple: I just can’t wait for having it. I looked at my bookshelf, more than fifty percent of books that I never finished reading and they almost never had been revisited. Even among those completed, I was not so confident that the information and knowledge delivered by writers was not misinterpreted by my mind at that time. Most of those misunderstandings persist in my mind. This lack of reading efficiency for me is due to two facts: too much short-term personal goal, and limitation of paper books. I’m not going to talk short-termness in this blog but limitation of traditional paper books is obvious: inconveniences of carrying with anywhere and anytime, less search, look up and analysis etc. software ability attached on contents authors delivered. Considering what value it would generate for me in the future of knowledge gaining, I would not tag its offering price as expensive. Rather, I would recommend to active readers and/or learners who should have one whether you choose Kindle or competitive products from other vendors.

There are two popular investment paradigms called value investing and growth investing. In short words value investors are hunting for companies with low price-earning ratio, price-book value ratio and just cheaply priced stock. Growth investors intend to buy stocks of companies that have fast earning growth and whose stock price are bidded higher relative to its history earning than its peers who are expected lower growth.

When the word investor is referenced here, it inherently means the type of the intelligent investor that Benjamin Graham explained in his same named book first published in 1949. There is no short-term investors since short-term and investor are contradictory. So here we can now claim that to an investor there is no distinction line between value investing and growth investing. An investor considers a company's intrinsic value as all discounted future earned cash that belongs to the company's shareholders. That inherently implies he needs to take growth factor in consideration to estimate its future cash flow. After the intrinsic value is cut further by the margin of safety, it results in the final price of the company he would like to buy at, which clearly indicates a value investing style of strategy.  So they are indispensable in an investor's decision process. Longer term the investment will last, more weighting of influence will go to growth factor.  So the big value comes from sustainable growth companies. What to buy is more important than when to buy. Don't get me wrong here, I didn't mean when to buy is not important since the investor will buy the stock only when the its ask price is below than what is estimated as intrinsic value per share.