A book in the St. George Seminary Press Personal Empowerment Series The life of Robert Clark, MBA, CPA has proven to be an ongoing lifelong learning experience. He is a physics graduate of Virginia Polytechnic Institute, with an MBA in Information Technology at George Washington University. During the 1960’s, he began to trade common stock with varying degrees of success, making most of the classic mistakes. When the stock market became profitable in the early 1990s, he became a professional investor. Robert Clark believes it is not the elegance of the evidence that matters in stock market investing, but the quality of the decisions based on it. He has amassed 45 years of investing experience. A former Army EOD officer, he was also President of The International Society for Philosophical Enquiry and currently resides in Albuquerque, New Mexico. CROSSING WALL STREET The Road to Independent Financial Security By Robert L. Clark, CPA ISBN: 978-0615510132 Available on Amazon.com and other fine retailers! Follow the link below to purchase online: Beginning investors, and that includes people with up to ten years of experience, have plenty of information necessary to make money in common stock investment. The difficulty is to make sense of it, to organize it, and to put it into a form upon which one can base a decision. Decisions in the stock market are simple; information in the stock market is complex. Is there a way to convert complex information into simple decisions without analyzing the entire market every time one acts? Crossing Wall Street says there is. We need a method to find what a stock is worth. We all know what it costs. There are three major methods, charts, the financial statements, and the art of contrary opinion. These vary in accuracy depending on whether one is buying or selling, but a lot of the detail in stock market analysis boils down to one of these three methods. Our major problem is not data analysis. It is to learn to avoid doing what we are told. The financial establishment makes a lot of money by simply ordering investors to buy bad stocks. Investors, surprisingly, obey. Let us learn how not to do this. This is the hardest skill described in this book. Studying the market top down reduces much effort simplifying information. First, we study the stock market as a whole and keep an eye on the Federal Reserve, because we live in a controlled economy. Then we identify promising industries. Finally, we identify good stocks within these industries. A good stock is not necessarily a good business. A good stock is a stock that is going to make us some money. Once we know what we intend to do, and why, we become immune to touts from Wall Street and can use a discount broker to transact our business. Learning these facts can save us from needing several extra years of experience to become profitable investors. It is ultimately not what we know, but what we buy and sell, that will make us rich.