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Strategies & Market Trends : Value Line Investment Survey -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: KevRupert who wrote (14)	6/11/2000 5:37:00 AM
From: EL KABONG!!!	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 219

advalorem, Are you saying that you receive the CD-ROM weekly, and you still receive a snail mail hard copy version, only monthly? No. With the CD-ROM version, you get it once a month (around the 15th or so) via snail mail. There is no hard copy, just the CD-ROM. The CD-ROM is equal to approximately 1 month's worth of hard copy material that is sent out to hard copy subscribers. You load the CD-ROM and then install it on your hard drive (an automated process that takes about 2 minutes every month). After that, you only need to keep the CD-ROM loaded if you want to read or print a company report. Reports do not install to the hard drive. They stay on the CD-ROM, but are easily accessible as needed. What you get weekly, is password access to an update folder contained on the VL website ( valueline.com ). The update folder contains two executable files which you download (every Friday, after market close) from the Internet to your hard drive. You then simply <click> on each of the two downloaded files (first one, then the other), and these two files update your personal VL database on your hard drive. With a 56kb modem, download time takes anywhere between 15 and 25 minutes in total, and then about 2 minutes to run the update on your hard drive. These weekly updates are the electronic equivalent of what hard copy subscribers receive via snail mail each week. Do you find the expanded version useful? The jury is still out on this one. There are some significant differences between Basic and Expanded company stock reports. To start, all 1700 companies in Basic have a VL analyst that actively follows the company, and completes at least one short analysis every quarter, with supplemental analyst reports as dictated by company happenings. The expanded edition has no VL analyst coverage at all. Next, the Basic companies have a Timeliness rating assigned to most every company. This rating is computer determined, via some secret formula, and is not influenced by a VL analyst's like or dislike for any individual company. The Expanded companies have no timeliness rating at all. What they have instead, is a Performance rating, which is determined via some secret formula, and earnings "projections" from analysts external to VL. The Performance rating is supposed to offer some guidance to short term performance for the Expanded companies. However, since this formula uses outsider's estimates (not VL analyst estimates) to determine a "ranking" number, it does not carry as high a confidence factor (or accuracy) as does the Timeliness ratings for the Basic companies. One reason for the difference in accuracy may be that outside analysts are comprised of both "buy side" analysts and "sell side" analysts. "Buy side" analysts are perceived to be more trusted by individual investors than "sell side" analysts. The difference between the two is that the "buy siders" are analyzing a company from the perspective of buying that company's stock for a mutual fund or a pension fund or for a brokerage firm (in other words, investing in the company's stock), while "sell siders" are actually trying to get people to buy the stock from their brokerage, for example in an IPO. "Sell siders" also have to earn "respect" from the companies that they cover (so that their firm gets new business from the company, such as IPOs or bond offerings which is much more lucrative than selling stock to individual investors), so that means that their analysis can be a tad "rosy" rather than bluntly truthful. For what it's worth, all VL analysts would be considered "buy side" analysts. I'd say that, until I get more experienced with the Expanded companies, the Expanded version is considerably less valuable to me than the Basic. The vast majority of companies that I even choose to review are in the Basic. I also think that the investment risks are much higher with Expanded companies, but that's just my gut feeling. KJC