by Pascal vander Straeten ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 15, 2017
A compact and detailed plan for understanding—and mitigating—largely unpredictable episodes in the markets.
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An in-depth series of strategies focuses on managing long-term survival in the business world.
Vander Straeten’s dense, information-packed nonfiction debut concentrates so tightly on tail-risk management in the modern, interconnected global world that it begins discussing tail events even before it properly defines them. (This is one of many indications that the book will be far more useful to business and management professionals than to beginners in the field.) A tail event, as the author sees it, is an occurrence that “from the perspective of the regularity of historical events or perhaps only from perception, should happen only once in a thousand, million, or billion years.” The key allowance there is of course “perception”—in reality, tail events are common enough on a small scale for experts to generalize about them and produce books like this one, designed to predict and alleviate their effects. “Tail-risk management,” vander Straeten writes, “has mostly been the focus of important theoretical literature that aims at explaining how real aggregate tail risks can arise from a variety of shock configurations at disaggregated levels of an economy and how one can model and hedge against them.” His guide aims—and admirably succeeds—at taking such discussions out of the realm of theoretical literature and putting them before readers in concise and concrete terms. The book includes an extensive bibliography and well-produced graphics designed to lighten its informational load, although the reading experience here is nevertheless pleasingly steep. The author, paraphrasing former U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, has thought deeply about the “unknown unknowns” that threaten the long-term survival of a business just as surely as they imperil society or the world itself. Vander Straeten breaks his work into roughly even segments dealing with tail-event assessment, management, and response, but the most compelling section covers the messages of these highly unlikely “black swan” episodes. “The idea is not to prevent tail risks from occurring,” readers are told, “but rather to build a resiliency in the business model to face and mitigate the effects of a black swan event.” Naturally, a good deal of the volume’s focus is on financial speculation, where the immediate personal effects of such unexpected incidents can be quantified. The central core of vander Straeten’s manual centers on capital and hedge fund management, outlining approaches to riding out market fluctuations and such. Here, as elsewhere, the author can get quite technical (“It is widely accepted within the financial markets community,” he writes in a typically galloping passage, “that there is a need to accept investment risk in order to generate the target returns set out in their investment portfolio strategies”). But the book’s clear common sense and advocacy of bold thinking in the face of uncertainty compensate for a perhaps unavoidable level of wonkishness.
A compact and detailed plan for understanding—and mitigating—largely unpredictable episodes in the markets.Pub Date: July 15, 2017
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Value4Risk
Review Posted Online: July 25, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 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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