An inclusive and deeply detailed overview of the investing world.
A wide-ranging guide to the paradoxes of investing.
In these pages, Lee seeks to advise readers on all the variables of investing in the modern market, “understanding where to invest, what to buy, and when to pull the trigger.” He intends his book to function as a kind of Rosetta Stone for investing terminology and thinking. In part, it acts as a primer on the ideas and concepts of investment basics, naturally centering around spotting trends and accurately gauging potentials. Lee concisely and insightfully looks into some specific trends, from the boom in renewable energies and the resultant growing need for better energy-storage technology to the so-called “gray boom” that encompasses ideologies and technologies connected with the fact that people are living, and working, far longer than they were a century ago. Lee guides readers through all the various mathematical and financial concepts of the investing world, using charts and graphs and quick, digestible segments to explain balance sheets, earnings statements, and valuation metrics, among other elements, and delve into their hidden layers. He demystifies concepts such as valuation for beginners and breaks down the interplay of subjective elements that drive prices and general trends. The sections of Lee’s book that speculate on future possibilities are absorbing, as they start with current tech before verging into science-fictional notions that could become reality in the near future; whether he’s writing about smart materials, solid-state batteries, smart technology, cryptocurrency, or automation and artificial intelligence, Lee breaks down the basics in clear, intriguing, and always readable language. The sheer amount of detail that Lee uses in analyzing trendlines is bracing, and even readers who are already familiar with the world he describes will pick things up from this book.
An inclusive and deeply detailed overview of the investing world.Pub Date: April 9, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-09834-122-0
Page Count: 364
Publisher: BookBaby
Review Posted Online: Feb. 25, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Perhaps not magic but appealing nonetheless.
Want to get ahead in business? Consult a dictionary.
By Wharton School professor Berger’s account, much of the art of persuasion lies in the art of choosing the right word. Want to jump ahead of others waiting in line to use a photocopy machine, even if they’re grizzled New Yorkers? Throw a because into the equation (“Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine, because I’m in a rush?”), and you’re likely to get your way. Want someone to do your copying for you? Then change your verbs to nouns: not “Can you help me?” but “Can you be a helper?” As Berger notes, there’s a subtle psychological shift at play when a person becomes not a mere instrument in helping but instead acquires an identity as a helper. It’s the little things, one supposes, and the author offers some interesting strategies that eager readers will want to try out. Instead of alienating a listener with the omniscient should, as in “You should do this,” try could instead: “Well, you could…” induces all concerned “to recognize that there might be other possibilities.” Berger’s counsel that one should use abstractions contradicts his admonition to use concrete language, and it doesn’t help matters to say that each is appropriate to a particular situation, while grammarians will wince at his suggestion that a nerve-calming exercise to “try talking to yourself in the third person (‘You can do it!’)” in fact invokes the second person. Still, there are plenty of useful insights, particularly for students of advertising and public speaking. It’s intriguing to note that appeals to God are less effective in securing a loan than a simple affirmative such as “I pay all bills…on time”), and it’s helpful to keep in mind that “the right words used at the right time can have immense power.”
Perhaps not magic but appealing nonetheless.Pub Date: March 7, 2023
ISBN: 9780063204935
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Harper Business
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2023
Sure to generate debate, and of special interest to adherents of free market capitalism.
A book-length assertion that capitalism’s woes can be traced to government interventionism.
Sharma, an investments manager, financial journalist, and author of The 10 Rules of Successful Nations, The Rise and Fall of Nations, and other books, opens with the case of his native India. The author argues that it should be in a better position in the global marketplace, possessing an entrepreneurial culture and endless human capital. The culprit was “India’s lingering attachment to a state that overpromises and under-delivers,” one that privileged social welfare over infrastructure development. Much the same is true in the U.S., where today “President Joe Biden is promising to fix the crises of capitalism by enlarging a government that never shrank.” Refreshingly, Sharma places just as much blame on Ronald Reagan for the swollen state that introduced distortions into the market. Moreover, “flaws that economists blame on ‘market failures,’ including wealth inequality and inordinate corporate power, often flow more from government excesses.” One distortion is the government’s bloated debt, as it continues to fund itself by borrowing in order to pay for “the perennial deficit.” As any household budget manager would tell you, debt is ultimately unsustainable. Wealth concentration is another outcome of government tinkering that has, whether by design or not, concentrated wealth into the hands of a very small number of people, “a critical symptom of capitalism gone wrong, both inefficient and grossly unfair.” Perhaps surprisingly, Sharma notes that in quasi-socialist economies such as the Scandinavian nations, such interventions are fewer and shallower, while autocratic command economies are doomed to fail. “[T]oday every large developed country is a full-fledged democracy,” he writes, and the more freedom the better—but that freedom, he argues, is undermined by the U.S. government, which has accrued “the widest budget deficit in the developed world.”
Sure to generate debate, and of special interest to adherents of free market capitalism.Pub Date: June 11, 2024
ISBN: 9781668008263
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2024
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