The most important edge you can develop in becoming a smart investor is knowing how to spot an emerging trend before the pundits are advertising it and everyone jumps on board. As global investment specialist and popular AOL Finance Editor and Money Coach Hilary Kramer knows, picking the stocks that are hot today doesn't give you that edge -- it just makes you part of the pack. Instead you need to learn how to get ahead of the curve, discovering the trends that will lead you to the best up-and-coming companies well before others are on to them. You don't need elaborate calculations or a degree in finance to discover great investment opportunities. As Kramer reveals in this fascinating and indispensable book, the clues are all around you, hiding in plain sight -- you just have to learn the secrets of spotting them as you go about your everyday life. Offering a wealth of specific examples from her own wildly successful investing career, Kramer divulges the remarkably effective techniques she uses to spot trends: nine powerful yet simple methods for discovering trend indicators all around you. Who would have thought that, in the days of the Atkins diet anti-carb craze, a company called Panera Bread -- now a booming chain -- would be a great investment? Hilary Kramer knew it would be. How did she know, way ahead of the crowd, that Embraer, an aircraft manufacturer located in Brazil, of all places, was becoming a market leader and had great growth potential? She knew how to spot the trend. As she shows, if you follow her simple methods, you, too, will be able to: Identify reliable market trends early Spot other, secondary, trends that will be sparked by more obvious trends Discover the clues in everyday life that will lead you to great growth companies Evaluate which companies among the competition are the best investments Recognize when a trend is peaking and it's time to sell Armed with her time-tested techniques, your own eyes and ears become your most reliable and powerful resources for market-beating wealth creation, not only today but for the rest of your life.

Hilary Kramer, a global investment specialist, is the Finance Editor of AOL and also serves as the AOL Money Coach. Her expertise in investing spans more than twenty years of experience in equity research, asset allocation, and portfolio management. She graduated from the Wharton School with an MBA, and within a decade she was recognized as one of the best equity investors on Wall Street and had amassed a personal fortune of more than $10 million. She has since then devoted her energies to helping individual investors apply the simple secrets that she used to bring her wealth and freedom from financial worries. She appears regularly as a commentator on the Nightly Business Report on PBS and has provided market commentary to The Wall Street Journal, Fox News Channel, ABC, Bloomberg, and CNBC, among others. Hilary also appears daily on the nationally syndicated radio show Doug Stephan's Good Day. She has held directorships in both NYSE- and NASDAQ-traded companies and, from 1994 to 2002, was the senior managing director of a $5.2 billion global investment fund with both private equity and publicly traded securities.