exchange

Michael Daugherty's book clearly draws on a wealth of in-the-trenches experience in planning, deploying, managing and monitoring the integrity and efficacy of Exchange environments at some of the largest corporations in the world.

Mike's book provides invaluable, easy-to-understand and most importantly, actionable ideas on how to best manage and monitor key aspects of Exchange 2000. This is an easy-to-understand, extremely clear must read for anyone charged with or interested in, understanding and managing the deployment and day-to-day management of a corporate messaging environment.

Mike has a terrific job of writing a lucid, well thought-out book on managing and monitoring Exchange. Very, very helpful not only for tactical "how-tos", but also for a top-down strategic perspective on this issue. A must-buy!

This book is a must have for any IT shop that wants to run and monitor Exchange to keep your system running 7x24. The book thoroughly covers all major areas and is a must have for IT Professionals. This is a crucial book for everyday tasks.

Loved PLAY MONEY from start to finish. It moves as fast as the trading floor where Pedersen finds herself at the tender age of 18. Newly arrived in the Big Apple she takes life in the fast lanes mostly in stride, along with the crazy antics of her cohorts. These people and situations were made for a sitcom and I can't believe that one hasn't been made of it yet. You'll learn a little about the stock exchange and options trading but not so much that the stories ever get bogged down. A fun read for anyone who has ever been in the biz (I was a currency trader in the 90s) but also if your just looking to cheer along a determined young person trying to pull herself up by the proverbial bootstraps.

This is not a financial book, though it tells you just enough to enjoy and understand what's going on. It's much more like LIAR'S POKER in that you get all the funny anecdotes about traders and the fear and greed that drives them. Pedersen is the perfect person to tell the tale, newly arrive on the stock exchange from upstate New York at age 18. My Uncle works on the trading floor of the NYSE and since the advent of cell phones and better computers it's certainly a new era. Pedersen's book is wonderful as a historical account of how it was before all that. And her personal story of moving to the big city from a small town, without much money and only a high school diploma from a public school, and setting out to achieve the American Dream is entertaining as well. And also, I would think, an inspiration to all ambitious young people (seeing as she wasn't even a good math student!). I particularly enjoyed all the bets and contests the guys would start -- as if making and losing millions of dollars every few minutes wasn't enough excitement!

I am working my way backward through the Pedersen oeuvre, having just read LAST CALL, BEGINNER'S LUCK, and GOING AWAY PARTY. I thought this was going to be another novel, but SURPRISE, it is an account of Pedersen's adventures going to Wall Street back in 1983, the start of boom times. She was only 18 and coming from a small town in upstate New York, a self-admitted hick, unable to find the stock exchange on her third day of work because it was raining and the flag wasn't flying. The supervisor had never heard THAT excuse before. Anyway, Pedersen is as light-hearted and charming in her nonfiction as in the novels. She doesn't come off as being a child whiz kid, though I imagine you must be pretty smart to do what she did, but credits her phenomenal success more to being in the right place at the right time, getting up early, and loving the work, action, excitement. Her coworkers are unbelievable and highly entertaining in their practical jokes and bizarre priorities. For someone who has lived in Indiana her entire life (me), it was fun to read about leaving home for a big city right after high school graduation, something probably many of us dreamed of doing, but for whatever reason didn't. This book reminded me why American is such a great country -- not so much because a teenage girl of divorced working class parents from a former steel town can strike it rich in just a few years, but because the young woman was able to make the opportunity for herself, no matter what happened after that. Though I'm glad she took her money and ran, and am looking forward to the next novel, HEART'S DESIRE. HOWEVER, if she wants to write another nonfiction book, I'd be happy to go along for the ride. Pedersen has the great comic/storytelling gift of making getting up in the morning into something funny and interesting. I read an essay she wrote about growing up with her mother (a nurse) on the Internet and it is laugh-out-loud funny.

Review of The Rotten Heart of Europe: the dirty war for Europe's money, by Bernard Connolly, Faber & Faber, 1995, £17.50.

THIS BRILLIANT book is a devastating exposure of the pretensions of those who want to rule Europe. It shows that the attempts to achieve monetary and economic union, and consequently political union, are bad for us. They will not bring monetary stability, economic growth or political harmony. Instead they will destabilise currencies, reduce growth and promote hatred between the nations of Europe.

Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) is supposed to build on the experience of the Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM). Britain's membership of the ERM forced us into a disastrous and quite unnecessary recession. After two years of suffering, Major said in July 1992 that Britain would soon be the leader of the ERM. Two months later, we were well out of it, and ERM had bermbed, as Jacques Clouseau, Major's mentor, would say.

ERM constrained British Government policy on non-monetary matters too. The Government appeased Spain over the fishing dispute to keep Spain happy about the sterling/peseta rate. So the Common Fisheries Policy, so damaging to Britain's fishing industry, is not an isolated EU aberration: it stems from the whole logic of economic and monetary union.

The ERM was described as the Eternal Recession Mechanism; EMU is likely to be Even More Useless. The ERM kept the poor countries poor; it did not help them to converge; it certainly did not help them to meet the Maastricht criteria. Spain's experience of ERM was catastrophic: 22% unemployed. The ERM forced Denmark into recession: unemployment doubled to 12%, the budget was slashed, and investment, output and wages all fell. In the ERM, Ireland's unemployment soared from 11% to 23%. ERM subordinated nations' economic interests to minorities' foreign policy goals: ruling class interests dominated working class interests. Some still claim that ERM and EMU could control capital, but actually they were and are attacks on the working class.

A 1992 report by the Monetary Committee, which advises the EU's Council of Ministers, admitted that ERM did not stabilise prices or money and did not reduce inflation. Perhaps it was after all just a tool for moving countries towards political union.

The book also depicts the present dangerous struggle between the French and German ruling classes for control over the proposed institutions of a single European state. Germany is determined to keep the Deutschmark and the Bundesbank: it wants EMU so that it can assimilate other countries into an expanded Deutschmark zone. France wants a new currency and wants to get its hands on the Bundesbank; it pushed for the Maastricht Treaty, which would destroy the Deutschmark. Who would control Europe's currency? Who would control the proposed new European Central Bank? Germany or France?

As Wilhelm Nolling, a Bundesbank Council member, said: "We should be under no illusion - the present controversy over the new European monetary order is about power, influence and the pursuit of national interests."

They are already fighting about the 1996 InterGovernmental Conference. Germany wants the economic criteria for EMU met as soon as possible: it insists that economic convergence must precede monetary union. France wants the earliest possible date for monetary union, believing that monetary union would produce economic convergence. Both are wrong of course: convergence cannot and will not be achieved, either way.

EMU's implications are universally unpopular. The workers of France, Italy and Belgium are striking against the EU's schemes. The Austrian Government fell in October, unable to pass the EU-required budget.

We can see both from ERM's effects, and from the effects of the attempted imposition of the Maastricht criteria, how damaging membership of EMU would be. It would cause, as intended, a permanent lowering of wages, a permanently higher level of unemployment, and massive cuts in public spending.

Connolly sums up: "My central thesis is that the ERM and EMU are not only inefficient but also undemocratic: a danger not only to our wealth but to our freedoms and ultimately, our peace. The villains of the story - some more culpable than others - are bureaucrats and self-aggrandizing politicians. The ERM is a mechanism for subordinating the economic welfare, democratic rights and national freedom of citizens of the European countries to the will of political and bureaucratic elites whose power-lust, cynicism and delusions underlie the actions of the vast majority of those who now strive to create a European superstate. The ERM has been their chosen instrument, and they have used it cleverly."

Bernard Connolly was fired by the European bureaucrats after this book came out. If you read this book you will understand why. This book has all the detail you could ask for. It is an incredible expose of the events leding up to European Monetary Union.

If you support the European Community, reading this book will change your mind -- if you dare read it.

Excellent work. The reality at the core of all the pomp-and-circumstance surrounding EMU. Read it and be wiser.

The author makes a simple and readable, but provocative and compelling, explication of the modern mechanism of wealth creation. Dr. Edmunds' great breadth of experience with the economies of First and Third World countries enriches his analysis and raises it above the purely theoretical. Read this book and contemplate its ramifications for the wealth of nations.

The author eloquently brings together forces that shape today's equity markets; and in an easy to understand way discusses the how's and why's of value creation through ownership of financial assets and how this has affected the population at large. Definitely add to your reading list if you're curious about economics, finance, political policies, world markets, production, how value creation leads to wealth creation through ownership of financial assets.

lays out the mechanics of financial wealth creation piece by piece, with simple examples, showing how the enormous pile of paper wealth has been created, and how it keeps growing so fast. Crisp and elegant prose; the erudite author grabs your attention and demands your respect

There have been major shifts and changes in the American financial world over the past two decades driven by the aging baby boom generation, the Internet and computerized day trading, global economic crises, and the "democratization" of the stock and markets. In Bull Run: Wall Street, The Democrats, And The New Politics Of Personal Finance, Daniel Gross examines how the changes in attitudes and policies of the Democratic party under the influence of the Clinton administration has led to an unprecedented period of sustained stability and growth in the American financial community, the rapidly increasing percentage of Americans owning stocks and mutual funds, with the result that today a majority of citizens have a personal stake in public equity and debt markets. Gross offers provocative opinions backed with true-life stories illustrating the new relationship and interdependence of politics and finance, Wall Street, Main Street, and Washington. Bull Run is highly recommended, informative reading for do-it-yourself investors seeking to understand American financial markets -- and what the on-coming decade might bring.

No Bull. Anyone with even a passing interest in national politics will find this book invaluable. The author, clearly a Jack of many trades, brings a wealth of evidence to show a shift in the political landscape that may well affect the outcome of the next election and certainly clarifies positions taken by each party. The stories, facts and humor made it eminently readable.

This book was a quick read and explained in an entertaining manner with wit and stories about the public policy issues and players in today's economy. There was a laugh a paragraph and it was a quick read. I enjoyed the characterization of his parents as academics who accrued wealth through TIAA-CREF.

Dr. Paul Scudder was my undergraduate organic chemistry teacher at New College of USF in Sarasota, FL. His book continues to sit on my shelf even now, as I am working on my Ph.D. in synthetic medicinal chemistry. We used it along with Dr. Seyhan Ege's undergraduate Organic Chemistry text, which is a traditional "white-pages" type of organic text. His class was the best class I took in my entire four years of college, and I cannot recommend his book highly enough to anyone who truly wishes to gain a fundamental understanding of organic chemistry principles. It was a tremendous help to me both in college, as well as in grad school while preparing for my qualifiers. The book is written at a level that is accessible to college underclassmen, but it is also useful for upper level undergraduate and graduate students who would like to review important organic chemistry concepts or see the concepts presented in a new, easy to assimilate, way. His 3-D reaction coordinate graphs, pathway decision cubes, and pathway classification schemes are some of the strongest points of the book. He also presents some advanced theories such as HOMO-LUMO and HSAB theories that are often not really taught to undergraduates, and these are extremely well-done and easy to follow. Dr. Scudder has great passion for his subject, and that is apparent in his book.

The few minor and petty problems with the book that I can think of are that he assumes that the reader has some previous organic background knowledge, the writing is sometimes choppy and jumps around, and the graphics are not state-of-the-art, as he did them himself. Chapter 2, on thermodynamics and kinetics, is especially difficult to follow for someone who has no knowledge about these subjects.

A superb, well-organized classification of organic chemistry for practitioners at all levels. Clear, concise, with a large number of charts and graphs, some of which are indispensable. A handbook which boils down most of what you need to know to understand a wide spectrum of organic reaction mechanisms. Reminds me of the Washington University medical manual series, which filtered all the medical knowledge of each subspecialty essential for daily use into a single pocket handbook.

Paul Scudder approaches organic chemistry from a completely different angle. While most organic books stress that a student memorize hundreds of seemingly unrelated reactions, this text is different. It teaches you the tools to classify organic reactions and solve them logically. This book and its method should be the standard for how organic chemistry is taught.

In this fantastic book Stanley Kroll discloses his secret of successful commodity trading. As a trader, I find that the book is very useful. The central theme is to follow the trend, than get in during secondary reaction or rally, and then set a rigid cut loss point. After retired from active trading, Stanley Kroll finally returned to the exciting scene of trading. But when he came back, he found that his theory is no longer applicable to the market. This teaches that each one has to be flexible and adapted to the market. He should also develop a new system to reflect the change in the market. Those who are interested in this field could also find the only book by Jesse Livermore, "How to Trade in Stocks" and read it. He could dig a lot of useful information from them.

I checked this book out of the library, read it and then went and ordered a copy to own. This book reads similarly to ROSO and Marty Schwartz's Pit Bull, except it makes an attempt to show you some of his methods through charts and thought process. Basically, align with the major trend, fade the counter trend at 50% retracements, scale in and scale out. Most of all, be patient, trust your trade and know when you are wrong. Whether or not he chose choice successful examples to write in this book is irrelevant. One gripe I did have though, was not seeing how he would come up with his price objectives, perhaps calculated off a 150% extension. I suspect this is in one of his other books.

I have read around 100 trading related books, this one was a sleeper book that was not expected to be great and so, caught me off guard. This book will certainly stay in my top 10 list and I will be sure to pick up the rest of Stanley Kroll's books.

You seldom find in the universe of trading books that a trader will use more passages to cover stories about his failure than success. This is just a rare breed. Perhaps Kroll was confident enough to do so with the backup of his outstanding trading record, and his determination to write a superb trading book.

To me, this is a modern day Reminiscences Of a Stock Operator ROSO. Of course, Kroll and his book are not as "great" as Livermore and ROSO. However, the tone/style of the books are not so distant, and so are their values. In fact, Kroll had voiced out his admiration for Livermore.

In short, cut loss short, keep profit run, plan your game well, focus on the major trend and buy on its minor retracement, keep absolutely calm and relaxed, see lights across the board and not just of what you trade, trade opposite to the news on mass media, mind the single/double day reversal, the sardine story (some commodities are for trading and not for eating), not to be worried about the beginning of a big trend coz it always lasts longer than most people expect, go along with the technical when it clearly shows something at variance with the psychology of the market, and much more wise words are present in this book.

As a value added service, I would like to quote one passage here for your reference.

"There's a great tendency to get carried away by the prevailing market psychology at that time and not doing any liquidating. But you've got to resist that tendency. When the market attains that major price objective, where you had projected closing out, say, half the position, do it. If you dont, you will probably regret it later."

In a word, a must read.

p.s. The only bad thing of this book is the exceptionally poor front cover design.

I have so far read half of this 600+ page book. (perhaps I'll give an update on the second half later, but couldn't wait to give my opinion now.) Larry Harris gives painstakingly clear and precise definitions of the language of trading. They ring very true. The first 100 pages is almost all definitions. He continues with an explain-by-defining approach throughout the book. He also includes interesting examples. Next he classifies traders by type based on their motivations.

While his classifications are helpful in many ways to understand trading, I believe that he put in a serious bias against the more open markets produced by decimalization. I am particularly concerned about his criticism of those front runners who, based only on their observation of trading patterns, trade ahead of value investors (using his terms); he says those front runners reduce the incentives to the value investors to correct prices.

Later in the book much of Harris' discussion of dealers assumes that bid and ask prices show fairly precise fundamental values. Yet he ignores that there so few value investors that, as Harris points out, Fischer Black said market prices are informative when they are between 1/2 and 2 times the true value (not everyone agrees). Actually those front runners amplify the information, allowing the value investors to have a greater corrective impact on prices over a wider range of securities, given their limited capital.

Overall Trading & Exchanges is a good and dense read, suited to an eager beginner or someone who wants a very clear review of the theory and practice of trading. I look forward to the rest of the book.

I have been trading for 8 years. 6 years prop trading, I now run a hedge fund. We make about 10,000 trades/day. I wish I had read this book years ago. I've had to pay Mr. Market a large sum to learn many of these lessons. Larry Harris has written what I consider to be the best book in the field of trading. He covers nearly all topics, from structural & regulatory issues, to descriptions of the players; costs to performance evaluation. Presentation is excellent - the numerous sidebars, tables & graphs serve to illustrate the text. My only complaint is that the book does not take the quantitative side far enough. I recommend a technical appendix plus specific references (perhaps annotating the excellent bibliography) for the mathematically inclined reader.

If you are interested in trading, or curious about the markets, buy and read this book!

If you don't understand how the markets work, want to learn more, and are willing to invest an immodest amount of time and money, this is a book you must read.

Larry Harris is a brilliant contributor to the understanding of markets, and is currently Chief Economist of the Securities and Exchange Commission. This book however, is written as a textbook for the introductory markets class he taught at USC for many years.

Larry's book pulls back the curtains on the mystery and mumbo-jumbo of what happens when investors buy and sell securities. The book is lightly written, with many anecdotes and amusing sidebars, yet presents the latest and best knowledge on how (and why) markets work.

Talk about a book that everyone should read, but no one will, this is it. A terrific, plain language explanation of the origins of money and how understanding money leads to political sophistication and concommitant societal benefits.

This book makes many cogent arguments that deal with war and external defense, interior political and civil stabilty, the societal need for a stable currency, the need for a rule of law to protect private property rights, and the implications of the velocity and movements of global currency trading. It does a great job of explaning financial derivitives, options, inflation, debasement of the currency via political corruption, and financial globalization of trade and currencies.

It contains a marvelous retelling of history thru the eyes of a currency sophisticate, one who incorporates a history of revolutions, and the subsequent rebuildings of the societies that gain prominence in their aftermath.

The backdrop for this fascinating tale is the rise of the micro-chip, the story of the digital revolution. This running-wild tale illustrates how technology has outstripped the ability of dictators to throttle it, and how society has commensurately reaped the benefits. It's a paradigm for the future and deserves to be more widely understood. It has shaken up the strangle hold of one political philosophy ruling the media, and in the future it will reform tort law and academia. It's all here for those willing to study it.

Read it!

Fantastic book, clearly written. A history of the systematic shift in power from governments to asset markets, especially in the Reagonomics era (which includes the 1990's). A 'must', along with "Inventing Money" and "Wall Street Capitalism", for those who want to understand the financial system and it's consequences.

I finally understand what Options and derivatives are. This is a wonderful, fun book which guides the reader through the history of monetary exchanges. Did I say fun? You have to read his description of Berkeley in the late 60s. Although I lived through it, I never understood the inflation or high interest rates of the 70s and how it related to taking the dollar off the gold standard. Oh yes I can see clearly now!

IT REALLY EXPLAINS IN AN EASY WAY ALL THE BASIC AND FUNDAMENTAL CONCEPTS ABOUT THE STOCK MARKET AND THE MOST POPULAR INVESTMENTS. IF YOU ARE A BEGINNER, IT SHOULD BE YOUR BOOK.

Sallie Mae, Freddie Mac, Investment grade, junk bonds, Moody's, averages, indexes, up-tick, supply and demand, coupons, convertibles, mutual funds, inflation, corporate structure, IPO's, OTC, volatility, types of trades, derivatives, financial statements, etc.

This book has everything. It is perfect for somebody who has started to dabble in stocks and is looking to become a little more sophisticated.

I will read this book multiple times and keep it as a desk reference. Everything is so organized right where you need it! It even gives you a few sentences of background to give you a feel for why things are the way they are. It explains where things got their names from. It is a GOOD BOOK.

I would not recommend this book for a total novice. It might be a little too much. But for somebody who has seen all these terms banging around for a while, this clears stuff up so much.

The organization is amazing. It just all fits together like never before.

Rod Davis shows how microeconomic, market and industry concepts interrelate and, eventually, how they affect the net wealth of each individual investor. This book nicely combines the big-picture approach with simple explanation of quantitative indicators/calculations. The stock market will not seem that much of puzzle to you after you've read this book.