A thoughtful but scattered reflection on the last decade of the country’s financial vicissitudes.
An assemblage of a professional investor’s blog posts about the management of one’s financial assets.
Debut author Weil retired in 1995 from a successful career as a hedge fund manager. At the enthusiastic urging of his daughters, he started a blog about the stewardship of financial assets and maintained it for nine years, running from 2007 to 2016. By his own account, he’s a less than prolific writer. In 2008, the momentous year of the mortgage crisis, he posted 17 entries, and in 2016, only one, which covered Brexit. The author describes himself as a contrarian and essentially risk averse. He prefers an atypical “top down” approach to hedge fund management, which begins with a basic decision regarding what percentage of one’s funds will be directed to equities and what percentage will be slated for fixed income rather than starting with the selection of individual stocks. He covers a wide range of topics with confident expertise. Some of his discussions are more imminently practical: how to properly deleverage oneself, when to buy into a bear market, or how to read the market’s “sentiment indicators.” Other posts are more broadly conceived: the government’s response to the mortgage crisis, China’s future economic challenges, or how hedge funds can be a destabilizing force. Thrown in are plenty of tantalizing apercus—the author proposes a theory about Bernie Madoff’s descent into criminality and considers the condominium market in Manhattan. The writing is crisp and often infused with charming personality: “You can assume that these are the meanderings of an addlepated geezer or reflections of someone who had spent several decades as a hedge fund manager, still retains most of his brain cells, and wishes to share his experiences and observations about the current state of financial assets.” This book isn’t written for the neophyte—if you don’t know what a Fibonacci number is, he encourages you to Google it. Also, one wishes the author fleshed out the basic principles of his approach more, perhaps in place of some of the more dated discussions.
A thoughtful but scattered reflection on the last decade of the country’s financial vicissitudes.Pub Date: Oct. 30, 2016
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 152
Publisher: KDP Amazon
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 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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