Facts & Figures:

Website: http://thestreet.com
Twitter: www.twitter.com/thestreet_news
Services: Equity Research, Screening, Education, Charting, News, Broker Research, Market Research, Daily Newsletters, Subscription Services

PROS: Plethora of Information, Credible professionals, Easy to navigate, Useful news and market analysis
CONS: Lack of Target Audiences, Lack of Education, Subscription Service Page Designs, A Little Gimmicky At Times

The Skinny on TheStreet.com:

TheStreet.com, co-Founded by Jim Cramer, has a plethora of resources that range from free news, commentary, analysis and charting and quotes to paid subscription products such as Real Money, Action Alert Plus and Daily Swing Trade. While TheStreet.com has a lot of credible products and commentary on their website, it’s extremely difficult for any beginner investor to discern what products are best for their investment time horizon and their risk appetite. This website is mostly targeted at investors who want some quick trading ideas, whether stocks, ETFs, or options, and who don’t want to deal with all of the countless hours of analysis themselves. While a lot of these products are extremely useful especially for the beginner trader, a lot of the advice and recommendations given within the subscription services and in market analysis are too broad. This makes it difficult for investors to understand the exact investment quality of the recommendation and whether or not it’s suitable for them to use.  However, the quality of the traders on this site is extremely professional, and the knowledge and experience that they have to offer is really valuable.  As professionals trading a lot of money, you can learn a lot about the markets and how money managers think, but what works for them doesn’t always work for the small individual investor because we don’t have that much money to work with.

TheStreet.com Ratings Report Based on Certain Criteria To Find The Highest Rated Stocks, ETFs or Mutual Funds.

TheStreet.com Economic & Earnings Calendar Powered By Zacks. Extremely Concise And Informative.

Ratings:

Overall Score: 4.3

This is a great website with a lot of good products, services and commentary. The website is organized well, has a plethora of information and has a number of credible sources. That being said, stock-picking sites with a plethora of different types of products makes it very difficult for investors to know what’s best for them, and almost seem like to trick the investor into paying for unnecessary subscriptions. I definitely think these product and services are worth taking a look at, but just make sure that you fully understand what each service and professional trader has as the goal, and that it agrees with your investment goals before subscribing.

Recommended Skill Rating: 1 (Rookie)

Quality: 3

The content quality on TheStreet is quite similar to other websites such as Zacks in that there is a plethora of information such as commentary, analysis and subscription products. And while the credibility of the website and it’s professional investors is top notch, it’s difficult for investors to use the information on these types of websites and match it with their investment horizon. Also, with any stock or options pick, risk assessment is key, and it’s difficult to assess a particular stock or option pick for everyone’s risk horizon which means that the only suitable users for this product are those who have the same investment style as the specific investor on TheStreet team.

Credibility: 5

This website is definitely a collection of great institutional investors, ex-hedge fund managers and individual traders, such as Jim Cramer, Doug Kass, James “RevShark” DePorre, Alan Farley and others. The difficult part of it is that with all of these products, it makes it difficult for the users to discern the credible products that are most useful for themselves.

TheStreet.com has incredible staff such as Doug Kass commentary and analysis that are incredibly insightful and useful.

Value: 4

TheStreet has an incredible amount of resources and information with all of the free services they give you including newsletters, articles, videos and trade ideas. The paid subscriptions, in general, are a little more difficult to justify unless the user already knows what risks and investment horizons that they will be looking at for the particular recommendations given. However, there are a few highly recommended subscription products for TheStreet including: Top Stocks with Helene Meisler, Real Money Silver with Doug Kass (which includes 5 other products of which I wouldn’t necessarily recommend but Doug Kass commentary is usually pretty good), and Daily Swing Trade with Alan Farley.  Each of these subscription products definitely bring important market educational value along with their market and investment recommendations and therefore, are great trading services for the beginner investor.

TheStreet.com's Jim Cramer has a very useful blog on his subscription services for Real Money and is just one of the many resources available with this paid service.

Features: 4

This website is extremely feature-rich with news, analysis, research reports, subscription services, charting, and videos. The organization of the material is phenomenal for the shear volume of stuff that they have, and it’s integrated well. Servers are a little slow at times based on bandwidth spikes and subscription service pages are a little outdated, but overall still a very feature-rich website and design.

Reliability: 5

Great website. Extremely up-to-date main website. My one wish is that the subscription service pages weren’t so outdated.

User Friendly: 4

This website definitely has it’s difficulties due to the amount of information that it contains. However, the main menu bar organizes the information extremely well and the search boxes are useful.  The front page is a little scattered with a lot of different categories and could probably be cleaned up some, but I had very little trouble navigating around the website.

Support: 5

Great customer support and help for anything that the user might need resolved.

In The Master Swing Trader, the author, Alan Farley gives the impression of attempting to encompass within 443 pages every rule and concept about short-term stock trading strategies that has ever been promulgated in modern literature. While this is not actually accomplished, the text gives the impression of providing “all you ever wanted to know about short-term, technical trading.” Rather than being limited to a description of the technique of swing trading in the sense it was used by writers such as Gann, the discussion deals with the broad scope of strategies that underlie and surround swing trading, exposing the underlying activity that drives price action and provides the knowledgeable trader with profit opportunity.

This rather lengthy book’s sixteen chapters are roughly divided among three major sections. The first, titled The Gateway to Short-term Trading, deals with chapters on Trading the Pattern Cycle, Preparing for the Market Day and Understanding Time. More than half the book is relegated to this section. In it Farley reveals the underpinning of his approach in subsections with intriguing titles such as “The Hidden Market,” “Cross-Market Analysis” (not to be confused with inter-market relationships described by previous authors), “Avoiding The Momentum Trap,” “Needle In The Haystack,” “Trend Mirrors,” Psychotic Trendlines” and “Farley’s ADA (Accumulation-Distribution Accelerator).” The whimsical nature of some of these belies their inherent seriousness. No skip through the park, here! This portion of the book requires most careful reading more than once in order to understand the import of the author’s ideas and appreciate the interrelationships among them. Here we find numerous descriptions of how the market works and how human players in the market game act in response to each other’s machinations, causing familiar price patterns to form. Importantly, Farley points out those places on price charts where opportunities exist and the manner in which they relate to the actions of the various participants.

The author gives the nod to a number of trading tools that are capable of being represented visually. He is adamant about such tools being far more useful than those which rely on complex mathematical procedures, principally because of the temporal precedence of price action. Such patterns represent market activity as quickly as it can be shown. Within that construct the author covers the use of a broad spectrum of popular trading techniques, ranging from predictive indicants such as Elliott Wave to purely descriptive tools like trend lines and chart patterns. Particular emphasis is given to the last of these. Farley’s use of patterns, while possibly not unique, includes some original twists to pique the interest of the careful trader.

Also included in the first section is a hallmark of Farley’s style, the use of cross-validated, multiple time-frames. Traders are well aware of the value of working across time frames. The same is true of using several tools to provide a stronger statement than is yielded by only one. Farley combines these techniques. He recommends “cross-verification,” the use of several market tools to provide consensual validation of a setup or entry position, in concert with several indicants of support/resistance across time frames. Of particular interest is the author’s use of a combination of S/R levels with Fibonacci retracements. These, applied in three time frames, form a key strategy for a confident entry and are represented in examples of numerous stock trades.

The second major section of this book is titled, “The 7-Bells: Tools To Locate Outstanding Opportunities” in which a generous chapter is devoted to each of seven specific trading techniques. If the reader has been anxiously looking through preceding pages for a by-the-numbers, how-to-do-it description of market entry, he finds it here. The detailed use of each indicant is described and is further amplified by advice regarding when and how to use other tools in conjunction with each of them, a hallmark of Farley’s strategy. This theme is reiterated throughout the book. Its truth is proven through the graphic display of numerous examples, also explained in the text.

The chart patterns that are subsumed under the 7-bell title have cute names such as Finger Finder, Hole-in-the-Wall and Bear Hug. A quick perusal of these chapters reveals the cutesies to be well-known formations. Well, why not? Did we expect the author to have invented new market activity? Not to be put off, we read further and find details about these well-known formations that have eluded us throughout our trading career. Furthermore, it begins to appear that the lack of this information may have been responsible for losses where there might have been profits. Take an introductory remark to the Dip Trip (cute name for buying a dip) chapter as an example:

Strong rallies generate sudden corrective movement to shake out weak hands. Swing traders can buy these pullbacks within a tick or two of a major reversal under the right conditions. The dip trip recognizes that many of these selloffs represent low-risk buying opportunities. But countertrends often last longer than expected, and no one wants to be stabbed by a falling knife. So, effective risk management requires careful stock selection, the right decline, and precise timing.

In the sixteen pages that follow this statement we find a method of trading out of a retracement that is specific and satisfies the author’s requirements. Each of the “bells” is similarly described, with attendant instructions on trade mechanics, setup tactics, trade execution and position management. Examples are clear and are documented graphically. This section is worth the price of the book.

The final section of the book deals with trade execution. While relatively short by comparison to the previous segments, it is nonetheless important, providing detailed advice about timing entry and exit. Such niceties as the specifics of trading a pullback most safely and the building of execution skills are among those covered.

The style in which this book is written reveals that the author obviously enjoys reaching his craft. He is a voluble, articulate writer who has something to say. He presents a vast array of facts and relationships revealing only a smattering of priority among them. To use all of these, the reader would need a prodigious memory, indeed. One gets the sense that Farley has provided enough good tools to allow a dedicated student to select judiciously from among them and put together a well-organized program of short-term trading whose rationale he understands and that has reasonable chance of being profitable. This book is the kind that lends itself to multiple readings, allowing additional information to be added to the trader’s bag of tricks each time.

Review by Edward Dobson, President
Traders Press, Inc.