A tightly written, succinct investment guide and a solid launching pad for anyone thinking about buying and selling stocks...
A debut primer on analyzing, buying, and selling Chinese stocks for fun and profit.
Blomberg, a Finnish author who founded and runs the website China Speculator, began investing in stocks in 1997 using money from a summer job and became interested in Chinese stocks after traveling to that country. Despite recent downturns in the Chinese economy and stock markets, he writes that the country is still an attractive speculation for those with a contrarian perspective, due to its high growth rate compared with Western countries. However, he says that investors must understand China’s changing economy, which is moving from dependence on heavy manufacturing to domination by service industries. Among the most attractive stocks in the latter category, he says, are those of companies involved in environmental cleanup, recreation, education, and culture, including Internet companies, some of which he briefly describes. But although Blomberg is bullish on China’s potential returns, he’s far from a stock tout. He takes a cautious approach throughout and warns readers that his book should serve only as a starting point for further research. He also gives advice on where to invest, saying, for instance, that companies on the Singapore stock market have been plagued with accounting scandals but may offer attractive valuations compared with those on the New York Stock Exchange, which may be safer bets but cost more. He also offers advice on how to buy, advocating purchasing securities in tranches when a stock is going up, rather than trying to get a bargain when a stock’s falling. He also provides tips on when to sell. Overall, although Blomberg says his book is for both new and experienced China investors, it will probably be most useful for the former. It offers readers plenty of investment ideas to follow up on, as well as resources for researching Chinese companies that interest them. The author gives lots of sage suggestions in this book, such as “Question everything” and “Do not argue with the markets,” which can only come from personal experience. Although there are few, if any, guarantees for any investments in modern times, his disciplined system for making profits and avoiding losses might offer readers a fighting chance.
A tightly written, succinct investment guide and a solid launching pad for anyone thinking about buying and selling stocks from China.Pub Date: April 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-9-52-936783-2
Page Count: 146
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 20, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An extraordinary true tale of torment, retribution, and loyalty that's irresistibly readable in spite of its intrusively melodramatic prose. Starting out with calculated, movie-ready anecdotes about his boyhood gang, Carcaterra's memoir takes a hairpin turn into horror and then changes tack once more to relate grippingly what must be one of the most outrageous confidence schemes ever perpetrated. Growing up in New York's Hell's Kitchen in the 1960s, former New York Daily News reporter Carcaterra (A Safe Place, 1993) had three close friends with whom he played stickball, bedeviled nuns, and ran errands for the neighborhood Mob boss. All this is recalled through a dripping mist of nostalgia; the streetcorner banter is as stilted and coy as a late Bowery Boys film. But a third of the way in, the story suddenly takes off: In 1967 the four friends seriously injured a man when they more or less unintentionally rolled a hot-dog cart down the steps of a subway entrance. The boys, aged 11 to 14, were packed off to an upstate New York reformatory so brutal it makes Sing Sing sound like Sunnybrook Farm. The guards continually raped and beat them, at one point tossing all of them into solitary confinement, where rats gnawed at their wounds and the menu consisted of oatmeal soaked in urine. Two of Carcaterra's friends were dehumanized by their year upstate, eventually becoming prominent gangsters. In 1980, they happened upon the former guard who had been their principal torturer and shot him dead. The book's stunning denouement concerns the successful plot devised by the author and his third friend, now a Manhattan assistant DA, to free the two killers and to exact revenge against the remaining ex-guards who had scarred their lives so irrevocably. Carcaterra has run a moral and emotional gauntlet, and the resulting book, despite its flaws, is disturbing and hard to forget. (Film rights to Propaganda; author tour)
Pub Date: July 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-345-39606-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The memoir of George Dawson, who learned to read when he was 98, places his life in the context of the entire 20th century in this inspiring, yet ultimately blighted, biography. Dawson begins his story with an emotional bang: his account of witnessing the lynching of a young African-American man falsely accused of rape. America’s racial caste system and his illiteracy emerge as the two biggest obstacles in Dawson’s life, but a full view of the man overcoming the obstacles remains oddly hidden. Travels to Ohio, Canada, and Mexico reveal little beyond Dawson’s restlessness, since nothing much happens to him during these wanderings. Similarly, the diverse activities he finds himself engaging in—bootlegging in St. Louis, breaking horses, attending cockfights—never really advance the reader’s understanding of the man. He calls himself a “ladies’ man” and hints at a score of exciting stories, but then describes only his decorous marriage. Despite the personal nature of this memoir, Dawson remains a strangely aloof figure, never quite inviting the reader to enter his world. In contrast to Dawson’s diffidence, however, Glaubman’s overbearing presence, as he repeatedly parades himself out to converse with Dawson, stifles any momentum the memoir might develop. Almost every chapter begins with Glaubman presenting Dawson with a newspaper clipping or historical fact and asking him to comment on it, despite the fact that Dawson often does not remember or never knew about the event in question. Exasperated readers may wonder whether Dawson’s life and his accomplishments, his passion for learning despite daunting obstacles, is the tale at hand, or whether the real issue is his recollections of Archduke Ferdinand. Dawson’s achievements are impressive and potentially exalting, but the gee-whiz nature of the tale degrades it to the status of yet another bowl of chicken soup for the soul, with a narrative frame as clunky as an old bone.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-50396-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1999
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