A prudent guide for self-starting investors with plenty of time and programming abilities.
An instructional manual focuses on setting up computerized trading systems that can manage the vicissitudes of the stock market.
Bensdorp starts his financial self-help book with a familiar observation: The stock market is notoriously unpredictable, and that volatility induces many investors to make poor decisions wrought by panicked emotions. As an alternative, he proposes the establishment of an automated trading system that doesn’t depend on accurate predictions at all since it is designed to successfully respond to whatever financial circumstances arise. Moreover, since the system runs independent of constant management, it eliminates the problem of emotional decision-making and the “psychological pain” of owning a plunging stock. The author breaks down the basic options for readers, describing four basic styles of trading and seven different systems that can accommodate them. The core of his approach is to employ several “noncorrelated” systems that “combine different directions and different styles, that is, trade long and short and trade trend following and mean reversion.” In other words, the investor can benefit from a market of any variety, bullish or bearish. In lucidly accessible terms, Bensdorp—“a self-taught trader”—explains the fundamentals of his methodology. His approach emphasizes a customized financial profile, one that clearly defines not only investors’ objectives, but also their tolerance for risk and willingness to patiently put in the time to set up the systems in the first place. The author’s counsel is unfailingly sensible and realistic: He cautions readers that this is a “get-rich-slow approach” that “does involve a good deal of effort upfront” and concedes that it could take “years of trial and error.” In addition, this manual is only for those “skilled with programming” since Bensdorp does not walk readers through that aspect of the systems.
A prudent guide for self-starting investors with plenty of time and programming abilities.Pub Date: Feb. 29, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5445-0603-6
Page Count: 206
Publisher: Lioncrest Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
More uncommonly sensible investment guidance from a master of the game. Drawing on his experience at Fidelity's Magellan Fund, a high- profile vehicle he quit at age 46 in 1990 after a spectacularly successful 13-year tenure as managing director, Lynch (One Up on Wall Street, 1988) makes a strong case for common stocks over bonds, CDs, or other forms of debt. In breezy, anecdotal fashion, the author also encourages individuals to go it alone in the market rather than to bank on money managers whose performance seldom justifies their generous compensation. With the caveat that there's as much art as science to picking issues with upside potential, Lynch commends legwork and observation. ``Spending more time at the mall,'' he argues, invariably is a better way to unearth appreciation candidates than relying on technical, timing, or other costly divining services prized by professionals. The author provides detailed briefings on how he researches industries, special situations, and mutual funds. Particularly instructive are his candid discussions of where he went wrong as well as right in his search for undervalued securities. Throughout the genial text, Lynch offers wry, on-target advisories under the rubric of ``Peter's Principles.'' Commenting on the profits that have accrued to those acquiring shares in enterprises privatized by the British government, he notes: ``Whatever the Queen is selling, buy it.'' In praise of corporate parsimony, the author suggests that, ``all else being equal, invest in the company with the fewest photos in the annual report.'' Another bull's-eye for a consummate pro, with appeal for market veterans and rookies alike. (Charts and tabular material— not seen.)
Pub Date: March 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-671-75915-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1993
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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