Since we’re doing a bit of a promotion for our Investor Advisory Service newsletter, I wanted to do a writeup of a few questions we tend to see regarding IAS.

It’s not always the first question, but one that we get on a regular basis is: When will I get my first issue of IAS?

If you ordered a print subscription, it’s going to depend a bit on your timing. We try to get the print issue delivered to you near the beginning of each month. To get the orders ready for shipment, the last day to order and still receive the next month's issue is the 20th of each month. For example, if you purchased IAS on May 19th, you would get the June issue when it came out. If you purchased on May 21st, you would start with the July issue. You still get a full year, it just starts a little later.

For the online part of an IAS subscription, the answer is a bit faster: Right Away; as soon as you have completed the purchase, you can go to our web site at www.investoradvisoryservice.com and get started. If you have an user ID and password with us already (from StockCentral.com or myICLUB.com) put in your username & password. (If you do not have one of these IDs already, or are not sure, create a new login and password. If you do this, your email must be the same we have on file with your IAS subscription.) Once this is done, you have immediate access to the current issue, as well as our archives going back to 2002.

It may be obvious, but keep in mind that if you have the print subscription, you can also get access to the online copy as well.

While it’s not quite as common, we do find that after digging in to the company profiles and stock studies, the question often comes up about how to make good use of the rest of IAS. While it’s not a printed copy, we do have a guidebook (currently twenty-seven pages) available on our web site.

Another question that comes up is how to use the SSG files that are available for each recommended company in each issue. Most of the time, having a copy of a program such as Toolkit 6 or Stock Analyst will mean that your computer is already set to know what to do with an SSG file. Sometimes though, it takes a little bit of extra help. I’m attaching two files to this posting, one in .SSG format, and the other in .ITK format. We use .ssg on the IAS site, but since some folks may want to trade files in .ITK format, I’m including both for anyone to work with. I’m not intending these to be any sort of recommendation, just example files to work with in case your computer isn’t set up to recognize them.

What you’ll want to do is save these files on to the desktop of your computer. For most browsers, this can be done by doing a right-click on the link, and choosing to save the attached file. After choosing this, the browser will likely ask you where to save the file. If it does not, then the browser has most likely had an option set up so that it will always download to the same location without asking. If that’s the case, you should be able to click + on the keyboard to bring up a list of recently downloaded files. From here, you can usually either right-click on the file in the list, and choose to open the folder/location, or you may see a link specifically giving the option to show where the file is.

Regardless of the method you use to find the file, here’s what to do once you’ve got it showing on your computer screen:

1. Right click on the downloaded file, select OPEN WITH > CHOOSE PROGRAM
2. Choose the program you want to open the file with, or click BROWSE to locate a program not on the list.
3. Check the box labeled "Always use the selected program to open this kind of file"

If our software is not on the list and you have to browse, you will need to navigate to the executables for the appropriate software. The path for each executable is listed below.

Investor's Toolkit - C:\Program Files\ICLUBcentral\Toolkit6\toolkit6.exe
Stock Analyst - C:\Program Files\ICLUBcentral\NAIC Stock Analyst\sa3.exe
NOTE: For some copies of Windows, you will need to go into C:\ProgramFiles(x86), instead of just Program Files. If you have a Program Files(x86) folder after opening the C drive, make sure to start there.

As I mentioned, the IAS site uses .SSG files, but since some clubs and members like to trade in the .ITK format, you can repeat the steps listed above for that as well.