Phil Town and Rule #1: Guide to Investment Success

I just saw this "secret of investing success" from Phil Town listed on page 27 of the summer issue of Success magazine. I had to share it with all of you. Here's the "secret":

Buy a dollar for 50 cents, sell for a dollar. Repeat till very rich.

Wow, this is pure genius! Here all along I've been trying to buy a dollar for 90 cents and sell it for a dollar! What a doofus I am!!!

Ok, enough with the fun, but come on. Is the American public really that stupid to fall for a one-liner like this?

Don't answer that question. ;-)

You have to admit it, though -- Phil has some pretty slick marketing people working for him to write stuff like this. It's quick, easy, short, and gets attention.

For those of you who can't get enough of Phil Town, I've written a lot about him and his Rule #1 book. Check out these posts:

• Review: Rule #1 by Phil Town

• Phil Town Day at Free Money Finance: Phil Town's 10-10 Rule

• Phil Town Day at Free Money Finance: Rule #1 and the Four Ms

• Phil Town Day at Free Money Finance: All Posts

Comments

[Flexo]

We love bite-size nuggets of wisdom. Chop up knowledge into digestible but abstract and easily-misintepreted one-liners, and you'll be a success, no matter what it is you're selling.

[Blaine Moore (Run to Win)]

Lather.
Rinse.
Repeat.

[J.D. @ Get Rich Slowly, from the above-mentioned expensive dream house]

To be fair, this is the core idea of Town's system: find a good company's stock that has been deeply discounted and buy it for half off. That's his "buy a dollar for fifty cents". It's a keen idea, but I don't know if his book does a good job of demonstrating that it can be done with reliable success.

I'm a couple months behind you. I just reviewed the book this week:

http://www.getrichslowly.org/blog/2006/06/26/phil-towns-rule-1-investing/

I think Town's ideas sound keen, but I'm worried about how practical they are. I'd like to see more documentation and more examples of when his method worked and when it failed. As I say on my site, it seems to me that it would be a rather easy matter for somebody to plug data on a large universe of stocks into Town's formulas and then see if they do, indeed, work. Until I see this sort of info, I'm reluctant to buy into the advice.

[J.D. @ Get Rich Slowly]

Ha!

My browser is auto-remembering a previous "tongue-in-cheek" add-on to my name. I'll have to fix that.

[Joel]

What's so wrong with that being the secret to becoming rich? It makes a lot of sense to me. Would you prefer the secret to becoming rich take 1,000 pages of densely theoretical description? I think the idea of most how-to books is to make complex problems simpler and easier to tackle for people, instead of vice versa. So in this case, yeah, the essence of his investing method is to buy low and sell high... which I think, if I'm not totally off base here, is what everyone is trying to do in the stock market.

[Cody]

He recomends over and over in his book to try it with watchlists and paper money before using your own money. I would like to hear from someone who tried the system and says it didn't work. Judging without trying it, is just gossip