If you like the Wall Street Journal but have resigned yourself to reading your neighbor’s leftovers because you don’t think you can get your own at a price you can afford, think again. In fact, you can get the Wall Street Journal at a discounted rate that should fit your budget. You can also read the Wall Street Journal online; you can even read part of the Wall Street Journal for free online. Read on to find out how.

Getting a discounted rate on the Wall Street Journal

The Wall Street Journal offers several different options depending on what you want. You can buy an online subscription, get discounts depending on who you are, and even have it delivered to home or office.

The print edition subscription

If you buy the print edition of the Wall Street Journal for a year, you’ll save the most; this is 80% off the cover price. It’ll cost you $119 year. You also get two weeks for free with this offer.

The combination print and online subscription

If you like your news online and in print, you can get both; for $155 a year, you can have the convenience of reading online whenever you want as well as the print edition at your fingertips. And with this offer, you get four weeks for free.

The weekend edition

The weekend edition is a souped-up edition of the weekly paper and includes the same intensive news coverage it always has. Beyond that, though, the weekend edition also covers fashion and lifestyle, leisure and arts, books, entertainment and culture, dining and cooking, and much more. As opposed to the weekday version, this is a bit more “family friendly,” and definitely “weekend casual.” This comes free if you pay for the online and print editions at $155 a year. And this subscription option lets you get your weekday paper delivered to your office, but your weekend edition delivered to your home, for no extra charge.

The student discount

If you’re a high school or college student, you can take advantage of the Wall Street Journal (both print and online editions) for just $19.95 for 10 weeks or $99.95 for 52 weeks. Be advised that if you want this rate, you’re going to have to verify that you are a student at the institution you have named.

If you really, really want it for free

If you really can’t afford to pay for the Wall Street Journal at all, there is a way you can read at least some of it for free. Let’s say you know there is an article you really, really want to read Read More »

REVISITING WALL STREET’S BIAS! June 20, 2008.

No matter where we are in a cycle an investor listening to Wall Street representatives on financial TV shows, or seeing their advice in financial publications, hears only that they should be buying stocks somewhere, never anything about taking profits, or heaven forbid, repositioning for the downside by selling short, or buying inverse mutual funds and etf’s.

To hear Wall Street tell it, there is no time that it’s wise to sell, no time that it’s wise to take profits. Oh sure, after a big decline has created serious losses in a sector or the overall market, Wall Street’s advice turns to talk of if the bottom might be near, whether it’s time yet to buy the tech stocks, or the financials, or the home-builders again, implying that, although you didn’t hear it from them, there certainly had been a time to sell them.

But that would be market-timing you say. And Wall Street tells us the market can’t be timed. Even after two hundred years of the most successful investors in each generation, hedge funds, corporate insiders, and mutual funds, proving otherwise, too many investors still believe it.

There are forces at work that prevent Wall Street firms from admitting how well market-timing works, even though that is the strategy they use for their own money.

To begin with, there’s no profit for Wall Street firms, only problems, if they tell investors when to sell.

Among the problems, a firm that issues a sell recommendation will reap the wrath of the corporation whose stock they advise selling. They will certainly not get their share of the company’s future investment banking business. In addition, mutual funds that own the stock will be angry, and mutual funds are far bigger customers of brokerage firms than are individual investors. When the time comes to sell a stock, or a lot of stocks, mutual funds want to quietly unload their portfolios while individual investors are still buying. Otherwise who could they sell to?

It might help investors realize the game Wall Street plays if we recall the late 1990s.

In 1997, Wall Street was pushing the Internet sector hard, which was a good move that worked until 1999, pulling investors into those stocks, with most making good paper profits. But investors were not told to take their profits in 1999. It was only investors thinking for themselves, and noticing that those who were recommending Internet stocks, including the founders who dreamed them up, the venture capitalists who financed them, and the institutions that were favored with the shares in the initial public offerings, were selling them as soon as lock-up periods ended. They were not holding them for the Read More »