The Stock Market Course
George A. Fontanills and Tom Gentile · 2001 · 463 pages
A soup-to-nuts beginner course covering brokers, asset allocation, fundamental and technical analysis, and options, written by the founders of Optionetics.com. It teaches you the vocabulary and the standard indicators, but it never tests any of it, and the worked examples are frozen at the top of the 2000 dot-com market.
The one idea
The book's real thesis is that a new investor needs a self-assessment before a strategy: figure out your time horizon, your risk tolerance, and your starting capital, then match that profile to an asset allocation mix and one of three trading styles (growth, value, or momentum) before you ever look at a chart.
Once that profile is set, the book layers on the standard toolkit for confirming a trade: moving average crossovers to read the trend, and oscillators (RSI, MACD, Bollinger Bands, stochastics) to spot overbought and oversold extremes. None of these are original to the authors; the book's contribution is walking a beginner through each one with real chart examples.
The other half of the book (not covered in this review) is a full options primer: strategy selection, the Greeks, expiration codes, and risk graphs. It reads less like a trading system and more like a 463-page community-college syllabus, which is exactly what the title promises.
What it actually teaches
The book does not build a single sequential system; it hands you four separate components you're meant to assemble yourself.
PROFILE YOURSELF FIRST
Before picking a stock, the book has you set an asset allocation split by years until retirement. Its own grid: 30+ years out, 25% small-cap, 25% large-cap, 20% international, 15% bonds, 15% cash; inside 5 years, that shifts to 15% small-cap, 30% large-cap, 10% international, 30% bonds, 15% cash. Rebalance the mix at least once a quarter.
PICK ONE OF THREE STYLES
Classify the stock, not just yourself: growth (earnings expected to outgrow the market, rarely pays a dividend, priced at a higher P/E), value (buy assets for less than the balance sheet says they're worth), or momentum (technically driven, shorter holding period, trades with oscillators like rate of change).
CONFIRM WITH THE STANDARD INDICATORS
A 50-day moving average is the last 50 closes summed and divided by 50, replotted daily. A buy or sell signal fires when the 50-DMA crosses the 200-DMA. RSI, from J. Welles Wilder, runs 0 to 100; a reading above 70 is overbought, below 30 is oversold (the book notes bear markets push oversold to 20 and bull markets push overbought to 80). MACD is the difference between a fast and slow exponential moving average, plotted against a zero line, with a buy signal when the fast line crosses above the slow one. George Lane's stochastic uses a 21-day high-low range, plotted as %K and %D on a 0-100 scale; a %K/%D crossover signals a trend change. Bollinger Bands widen with volatility and narrow when it drops, and work best paired with RSI rather than alone.
CUT LOSSES AT 7 TO 8 PERCENT
Citing Investor's Business Daily founder William O'Neil, the book's hard rule is to sell once a stock has fallen 7% to 8% from your purchase price, no exceptions, no averaging down, and no waiting for it to come back. Write your exit price down before you buy, not after.
What it looks like Monday morning
A reader who has never traded comes away with a working vocabulary: what a moving average crossover means, what RSI overbought and oversold actually look like on a chart, and a concrete rule (the 7-8% stop) to write down before placing a trade. That's the realistic Monday-morning takeaway: set the stop-loss level in writing before you buy, not the moment the position starts losing.
It won't hand you an edge. There's no backtest anywhere in the covered chapters showing the moving average crossover or the RSI thresholds actually made money over a period of time; the chart examples are illustrations, not evidence. Treat the indicators as a shared language for reading a chart, not a system to trade on their own.
| Years to Retirement | Small-Cap | Large-Cap | International | Bonds | Cash |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 30+ | 25% | 25% | 20% | 15% | 15% |
| 20+ | 25% | 30% | 15% | 15% | 15% |
| 15+ | 20% | 35% | 10% | 20% | 15% |
| 10+ | 20% | 30% | 15% | 20% | 15% |
| 5+ | 15% | 30% | 10% | 30% | 15% |
| Retired | 5% | 30% | 5% | 50% | 10% |
The book's own grid, meant to be rebalanced at least once a quarter as time horizon and risk tolerance shift.
It's better to be out of the market wishing you were in it, than to be in the market, wishing you were out!Fontanills and Gentile, The Stock Market Course
Where it fails
- The stock picks are a time capsule of the exact market top the book was published into. Figure 4.2's sample portfolio table lists Enron (ENE) as a 'Growth and Income' pick alongside Duke Energy and MCN Energy. Enron's accounting fraud broke open in October 2001, months after this book's copyright. The chapter 4 market snapshot is also dated to a single afternoon, August 8, 2000, near the Nasdaq's all-time high before the 2000-2002 crash erased most of the era's 'aggressive growth' names the book uses as examples, including Check Point and EMC.
- None of the indicators are backtested. RSI, MACD, Bollinger Bands, and stochastics are each explained with a formula and one annotated chart, never with a win rate, a holding-period return, or a comparison against buy-and-hold. The book even admits oscillators 'work best in nontrending markets' and become unreliable in a strong trend, but never quantifies how often that failure mode shows up.
- The web resource list is a 2000-era bookmark file, not a method. Large stretches of chapter 4 and the 'Roadmap to Success' section are lists of URLs (Quote.com, EquityTrader.com, my.zacks.com, treasurycorner.com) recommended as free tools. Most of that free-tier internet from 2000 is gone or paywalled now, so a reader following the book's literal instructions hits dead ends immediately.
- It is a survey course, not a system, and options dominate the back half. The book runs 463 pages across brokers, asset allocation, fundamental analysis, technical analysis, sentiment analysis, market history, and a full options primer. There is no single throughline strategy; a reader who wants one method has to assemble it themselves from four unrelated chapters, which is exactly what this review had to do.
- The authors are promoting their own business throughout. Fontanills and Gentile ran Optionetics.com, and the book repeatedly steers the reader to Optionetics tools (the Portfolio Tracker, the 'Platinum program' for risk graphs) inside chapters that are ostensibly teaching general market analysis. The 7-8% stop-loss rule itself is credited to O'Neil, not tested independently by the authors.
Who it is for
Buy it if
You have never traded and want one book that names every major concept (asset allocation, growth versus value versus momentum, moving averages, RSI, MACD, options basics) so you know what to look up next. Treat it as a glossary with charts, not a strategy manual.
Skip it if
You already know what RSI and MACD are, or you want a tested edge with real performance numbers behind it. Also skip it if outdated web links and stock examples from the peak of the dot-com bubble (including a since-collapsed Enron) will bother you more than the underlying concepts help you.
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