Review: The Wallstrip Edge by Howard Lindzon

Investing books run the gamut from bad to Mad and from the solipsistic to the sophomoric. Most are wasting your time with hackneyed investing tips ("buy low; sell high") or the author's idea of the latest hot stocks. Such books seem designed to get you to watch the author's nightly TV show or to buy their next book.

In short, creating noise.

"Noise is the investor's worst enemy," Howard Lindzon says to open his book, The Wallstrip Edge: Using Trends to Make Money -- Find Them, Ride Them and Get Off. "It leads to fear, anxiety, and countless investing mistakes."

Lindzon tells his readers to turn off the TV, stop reading the financial headlines, and to ignore hot tips from friends, family, or your neighbor's dog. Rather, Lindzon, creator of Wallstrip.com the web-based video program that mashed pop culture and the stock market, offers an alternative approach.

It's a simple premise: stocks that have hit an all-time high and are showing signs of growth are likely to go up before they go down. For many, this is counter-intuitive: how can what appears to be an expensive stock be a good bet for an investment? Why don't I just buy a lower priced stock so I can buy more shares?

Lindzon suggests that jumping on a trend on the way up, riding it until it begins to show signs of slipping, and managing your price threshold can lead to greater success than traditional approaches to stock market investing.

He's a good writer, as readers of his popular blog are aware. And he has as much fun at his own expense as a stand-up comedian. But don't let the class clown image fool you, Lindzon is a smart investor and business man with a string of successes, Wallstrip and Golf.com among them.

His latest venture, StockTwits, builds on his own advice to connect to and leverage a network of people you trust to help you stay on top of trends, creating conversation rather than noise.

And staying on top of trends is important in today's rapidly changing investing landscape. The trouble with many investing books is that things are changing so fast that what is a high-flying stock when the author is writing may have tanked by the time of publication.

Certainly you can point to some of the stocks Howard Lindzon discusses in The Wallstrip Edge and say the same thing. Actually, even Wallstrip is no more; CBS, which bought the property from Lindzon in 2007, recently pulled the plug on the program.

But Lindzon suggests it's not about individual stocks, but the opportunity and, if you stay focused on the all-time high list, you'll always find an opportunity. The glass is half full and new trends always emerge. You simply need to pay attention.

Sound advice from a seasoned pro. And worth the price, which by the way costs about as much as a share of $CBS stock at its 52-week high.

(Disclosure: I am Long Howard Lindzon and StockTwits.)

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Wallstrip Turns Two

Wallstrip celebrates its 2nd Anniversary today. One of our favorite, actually, the only "web tv" offering we watch regularly, Wallstrip looks at stocks, companies, and trends, especially those that are trading at or near an all-time high. Wallstrip is, as its website describes, "where pop culture meets stock culture."

Founded by Howard Lindzon, Adam Eland, and Jeff Marks, Wallstrip was hosted by the fabulous Lindsay Campbell (now the host of MobLogic.tv) and currently by the equally fabulous Julia Alexandria, who took over in January of this year.

Howard conceived of the idea in the Summer of 2006. He "wanted to create a show like Jon Stewart about stocks. Positive and simple." Eight months after launching Wallstrip, Howard sold it to CBS for $5 million.

Over the past two years Wallstrip has featured alternative energy and green stocks (see search list here), such as WFR, CLHB, and ORA.

Here are two episodes (one from each of Wallstrip's delicious hosts) on wind and solar energy:


Watch CBS Videos Online



Congratulations to the Wallstrippers, and here's to another fabulous season of Wallstrip!

Howard's latest play is StockTwits, which he is developing with Soren Macbeth. StockTwits is an open, community-centred investment idea and information service. Think of it as a "Bloomberg for the little guy."

Soren built it off the Twitter API as a way to track real-time conversations between people interested in stocks, trading, and sharing. Check it out: StockTwits

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What Are You Doing? Wallstrip Does Twitter

Okay, this is outside my usual subject matter, but I've been a fan of Twitter ever since Fred Wilson sold me on the microblogging service over a year ago. (You can follow me at greenskeptic)

I know a lot of people who don't get Twitter, including some who are near and dear to me. Most think it's an unnecessary distraction; some actually think it's evil.

I used to think the former, but then I became addicted. After many months of using it, I realized the best answer to Twitter's simple question, "What Are You Doing?" is NOT, "Having a sandwich" or "Drinking my 3rd cup of coffee."

It's also a good idea not to answer, "Having a bad day at the office." You never know who is watching...unless they follow you. Like any communication tool it needs to be used judiciously and thoughtfully. (I've learned that lesson the hard way.)

What Twitter does best is allow you

1.) to stay in touch with people you don't get to see or speak to often -- or meet new people with whom you would otherwise not be connected;

2.) to post quick takes on subjects you are interested in but don't have time to write a blog post about, and

3.) to wrestle with business problems, the answers to which may already be out there in the Twitterverse.

I've even used it to ask my followers -- now over 350 people -- to help name my book or my green energy investing start-up. (More on THAT later...)

Recently, a number of us are using Twitter to muse about the rise and fall (mostly fall) of our stock portfolios and to gauge what others are thinking about companies we are interested in.

StockTwits scans your tweets (as long as they contain a stock ticker preceded by $, such as $FSLR) and automatically indexes and displays them with a chart of the ticker.

Now, two of my favorite addictions, er distractions, Twitter and WallStrip have come together, trying to answer the question, "What ARE you doing?"



Shout-outs to Howard Lindzon and Soren Macbeth, who got me into StockTwits early -- another great distraction, er tool.

Energy: Speculating on Oil Speculators, Wallstrip and others Weigh In

Is the high price of oil due to oil speculation? Opinions differ on the impact of investors looking to make a buck on limited supplies and rising demand.

Some point out that while the White House would like to blame supply shortages, that's the same argument given back when Enron was fleecing California by manipulating energy prices.

"Many members of the media have forgotten how in 2001 the White House deflected any blame for California's suddenly stratospheric electrical costs away from their Houston friends," wrote Ed Wallace in his Business Week Viewpoint piece on 27 June 2008.

"Likewise, our Energy Secretary has a real problem discussing issues with facts. Like a broken record, he continues to maintain that in no way has speculation had anything to do with today's high oil prices. No, to hear Sam Bodman tell it, they are now and always have been caused by too many buyers chasing too few barrels of oil."

But, as our friends at The Oil Drum (TOD) reported last week, a recent report by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), "threw cold water on the recent rhetoric in Congressional testimonies and television commentary that high oil prices are caused by investment speculators."

TOD quotes from the report, "The Task Force's preliminary assessment is that current oil prices and the increase in oil prices between January 2003 and June 2008 are largely due to fundamental supply and demand factors." And pulls this graphic to illustrate this view:



"During this same period," according to the report, "activity on the crude oil futures market – as measured by the number of contracts outstanding, trading activity, and the number of traders – has increased significantly. While these increases broadly coincided with the run-up in crude oil prices, the Task Force's preliminary analysis to date does not support the proposition that speculative activity has systematically driven changes in oil prices."

Now, our favorite Web tv daily, Wallstrip, takes a crack at explaining the links between the run up and commodities speculation:



Now, we'll believe anything Julie tells us (except that she'll call when she says she will), but the fact is, the run-up in oil prices is probably a bit of everything: less supply, higher demand, speculation, and good old-fashioned free-market profiteering (not that there's anything wrong with it...).

Clean Tech: ZapRoot Picks Apart the Pickens Plan

ZapRoot, which bills itself as "an unconventional bite-sized news show that covers the fast changing world of the modern Green Revolution."

Like other web tv news shows it's a little bit snarky, a little wacky, and treats you to little clips of humor that broadcast news shows could not get away with (see the "documentary footage" in the show below. Host Jessica Williamson is no Lindsay Campbell or Julie Alexandra, but her spunkiness may be infectious. (And oh, that accent...)

Here is Jessica on the Pickens Plan (and rumors that it may be a bait and switch play to get his hands on water):



I'm still picking through the Pickens Plan and Al Gore's latest call to action and will have a post to share my thoughts before the weekend (I hope; it's been a busy few weeks).

Here is the Pickens Plan video; judge for yourself:

Wallstrip on Oil and Gas Prices: They've Got Us Over a Barrel

Our minivan now cost over $70 to fill. We don't even drive it that much, but it still hurts.

Here's a Wallstrip "Julie in the Street" episode on oil and gas prices in New York. I'm with Julie, don't know whether to laugh or cry:



The saddest (but truest) comment is the Brit who says he'd pay whatever it takes for a gallon of petrol and just have to do without something else. OPEC take note!

Philanthropy 2.0: DonorsChoose on Wallstrip!

What happens when two of my favorite web gems come together?

Take a look as the lovely Lindsay Campbell of Wallstrip sits down with heartthrob handsome Charles Best of DonorsChoose.org. Charles does a fantastic job telling the story of how DonorsChoose came about and why it's successful. His enthusiasm is infectious and Lindsay, as only the best talk show hosts do, does a great job letting him shine.

I was so moved, I was the first to click the donate button on the Wallstrip Challenge. And partially funded a project in Brooklyn called "iPod as a Prize for Investing Guru," where 8th graders are learning how the stock market works by receiving a hypothetical $100,000 to "invest" over the course of the next six months.



Read more about my own recent experience with DonorsChoose: Green Skeptic Gives

You can watch Wallstrip daily from my sidebar below, right.

(Disclosure: Charles Best is an Ashoka Fellow; I currently work for Ashoka. Further disclosure: long on Wallstrip; long on DonorsChoose.)

(Updated with embedding fixed - thanks, Adam!)