A concrete and practical, if sometimes-repetitive, guide to the stock market for the beginner.
A neophyte investor shares his experiences and insights as he learns to navigate the world of financial investment by using a fantasy portfolio.
Slauter lays the groundwork for his investment “diary” in his book’s first section, “The Set Up,” a vivid, engaging account of the emotional and financial effects of his aging parents’ decline and his father’s death. During this time, the author says, he first realized just how expensive getting older could be, so he became determined to take responsibility for his mother’s security by finding out as much as he could about investing. He came up with a fail-safe way to learn without losing—he set up a fantasy investment plan, followed it for a year, and compared it with his mother’s existing investments. His next steps were to keep careful records and share his results with other would-be investors. In 14 subsequent chapters, the author details his fantasy stock portfolio and offers a month-by-month accounting of their activity, including spreadsheet charts of gains and losses. Each chapter ends with a “Lessons Learned” section; at other points, he includes definitions of important terms, among other useful notes. Slauter’s book is packed with information, and he’s clearly a methodical problem-solver with the patience, energy, and skills to do the extensive research needed to develop an investment portfolio. Unfortunately, the promise of the first, compelling chapter isn’t realized in the rest of the book. Readers who don’t share Slauter’s attention to detail may find it hard to stick with his meticulous approach—and perhaps such readers aren’t temperamentally suited to managing their own stocks. Still, the author does a good job of conveying the frustrations of dealing with bureaucratic institutions and email scammers, and he points out repeatedly that investing is hard, confusing, and emotional. Debut illustrator Fuchs’ color images are well-drawn and often appealing. However, some of their captions, such as “You know you’re a novice investor when…you think DOW is a kind of boat,” fall a little flat, and the only investor they depict is white and male.
A concrete and practical, if sometimes-repetitive, guide to the stock market for the beginner.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Lee and Lea Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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