A highly informative, well-structured deep dive into advanced stock market techniques.
A beginner’s guide to becoming an active investor.
Girardi, in his debut, centers his argument on the idea that the “financial market is not a casino.” Instead, he says, the market should be thought of as a machine or a “highly efficient, mathematically driven wealth-transfer engine.” In order to get on the right side of that wealth transfer, according to the author, one must enter the world of options trading. This is not something that can be done overnight, however; there are steps involved. And those steps (grouped into “tiers”) are what make up the core of this work. Tier 0 is all about security. Before people start actively investing, they must have a Cash Baseline, that is, “three to six months of baseline operational living expenses.” People can consider this baseline their “safety glasses” (engineering metaphors run throughout the book). They also need to ensure that they’re avoiding pitfalls such as high-interest consumer debt. Tier 1 involves items like making use of different metrics for investment “campaigns.” By Tier 2, readers (or “Active Operators” in the book’s parlance) are making use of margin to increase their available funds for investment. In the highest tier, Tier 3, the author explores concepts like the “Capital Allocation Matrix.” Along the way, diagrams, checkpoints, and Q&A sections help to complete the work; questions include “My stock is up today, but my short put is somehow showing a loss. Why?”
For a book that’s under 300 pages, Girardi’s guide offers an impressive amount of actionable information. From an exploration of market volatility with concepts such as implied volatility and realized volatility to tax tips (e.g., “Taxes are the ultimate systemic drag on capital efficiency”) to the importance of dollar-cost averaging, there’s certainly a lot for any potential Active Operator to take in. Much of this material makes for sound advice for any level of investor; even if readers would rather not dig into the details of, say, unused margin buffer (the “mandatory allocation of unutilized buying power required to absorb a sudden volatility shock without triggering a forced liquidation”), such terms are still useful to understand. Granted, there are many such terms throughout the book. Tips like “Never sell a call at a strike price that rests below your physical stock’s cost basis” certainly require some careful unpacking. The book’s engineering metaphors don’t always help to clarify concepts: For instance, for readers to set a solid foundation, they’re told that if a “workspace is chaotic, it does not matter how flawlessly the machine is programmed—the operator will eventually slip, and the resulting injury will shut down production.” While this may be true, it still seems extraneous. Nevertheless, the book on a whole has a great deal to teach, offering both insight and guidance to potential investors of different stripes.
A highly informative, well-structured deep dive into advanced stock market techniques.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2026
ISBN: 9798996902101
Page Count: 297
Publisher: Machine Tool Press LLC
Review Posted Online: Sept. 7, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A passionate and accessible guide to humanizing the workplace.
Helbig and Norman present a game plan for making leadership more responsively human.
In this expanded update to The Psychological Safety Playbook: Lead More Powerfully by Being More Human (2023), the authors provide “practical strategies for responding to resistance, sparking change, embodying the change we want to see, and moving forward deliberately,” specifically in a business setting. They suggest ways to encourage what they call “changemakers” through the use of five key “plays” from their playbook: Communicate Courageously, Master the Art of Listening, Manage Your Reactions (“shift from automatic reaction to conscious response to stay better connected to yourself and others”), Embrace Risk and Failure, and Design Inclusive Rituals. The goal is to ensure that organizational cultures promote psychological safety, guided by leaders who “walk the talk” by emphasizing their own humanity at every turn. (“We must be the first to share our own failures with our teams, which will start to make it possible for others to do the same.”) This call for example-setting is sounded throughout the book as Helbig and Norman urge their target audience (leaders and would-be leaders) to go beyond mere instruction and instead embody the qualities they want to see in their subordinates, such as continuous learning, active curiosity, and self-reflection. Each chapter includes a detailed “Recommended Reading” section and text with extensive numbered and bulleted points formatted to make the core concepts more immediately digestible. The authors effectively employ clear and empathetic prose to assure readers that psychological safety is slow to build and quick to break, observing that such safety requires steady attention and delivers outsize payoffs as a result. They refreshingly ground a great deal of the material in psychology and neuroscience, pointing out, for instance, that research has demonstrated that the parasympathetic nervous system responds to honest appreciation, which improves creative thinking. Some wistful readers might consider some of the authors’ suggestions beyond the reach of their own organizations, as when group facilitators are advised to “gently intervene when someone dominates the conversation,” but hope springs eternal.
A passionate and accessible guide to humanizing the workplace.Pub Date: May 19, 2026
ISBN: 9798993550503
Page Count: 170
Publisher: Crazy Idea Press
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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