market-economics

Have you ever seen a new business start up and think to yourself, " Boy I wish I had thought of that!"? Well this book is the answer. It is chocked full of ideas of things you can do to start your own business. Carl T. Shepherd has so many good ideas and some of them are from his childhood, which you will get to read about along with stories about his amazing mother Ultra-Violet. I highly recommend this book to anyone who needs some new ideas about starting up a business, or just anyone who likes to hear about the old days and needs a good laugh.

I was attracted to this book because of the funny cover. I discovered a couple of other things too. First, Mr. Shepherd has written some pretty funny stories about his family and their job hunting. I was also impressed with the number of jobs that can be started with almost no money. Not every job is for everyone for sure, but it was really helpful to be able to start thinking about what I already have that can be used to start a small business. Thank you Mr. Shepherd.

I first read this book for a graduate psychology class and have since referenced it in several papers and given several copies to business people I know. Basically, it solves the problem of how to align people's personal agendas (pay), with organizational agendas (profit). It also makes the manager more efficient because they no longer have to supervise employees as closely. It is important to note that the system described in this book is better than typical commission or piece-rate systems. Switching to this system will increase the profits of any company bold enough to fully implement the switch. Even if you are not a fan of pay-for-performance, the first seven chapters provide an excellent insight into why people rarely perform to their full potencial in modern organizations.

This book verbalized some of the problems that I, too, (as a compensation manager) had observed within employee populations at companies in which I worked. It was particularly effective at describing the pay for time culture that is rampant among U.S. workers. The easy to read text was divided into short chapters that described not only the problem but also provided a solution through a balanced scorecard approach. One of the best books on pay that I have ever read.

This is the true success bible that others just copy. It has helped me understand what happens at work and how to succeed.

This is not "How to Make a Lebenty-Leben Billion Dollars By Tomorrow Morning at 9:00 am" What it is, however, is an intelligent approach towards achieving success. Note that Success according to Scheele is not equal to making a lot of money. If you agree, buy it!

Chuck Carlson knows how to weather these stormy markets. He explains why even the most appealing stocks may not be right for everyone's portfolio and shows in clear, well-written ways -- how to buy and hold and build a portfolio that will make profits in the up markets as well as these downturns we have all been hurt by.

Some of this book's strategies presented coincided with my own: start investing ASAP, dont confuse investing with trading, buy only stocks and stock mutual funds, invest every month, buy and hold. The book also warns you about the common mistakes investors make and how to avoid them. Ultimately, he shows through many examples that slow and steady wins the race....this book was a great investment...Im even buying copies for my friends in my investment club.

As we have all sadly found out in the past 18 months, volatility is here to stay and the depressed markets of the past year have sent all of us personal investors into a tailspin.

Carlson's newest book argues that these markets are not a fluke but that the ongoing changes in the economy, including corporate layoffs and the instant access to information, is going to keep the market see-sawing for years to come.

His basic buy and hold strategy (then at the right time, buy some more) is not sexy but sound. Especially useful are Carlson's chapters on using asset and time diversification to ride out the downturns and his list of easy hold stocks that reduce the effects of volatility on your overall portfolio.

Bottom line: If you are tired of the talking heads on CNBC. If you feel like you need a sound investing plan that will provide security and profit for the long-term.....buy this book!

Of the many dozens of books I've read on markets, trading and speculation this is clearly the best. Extremely well written, the book is both educational and entertaining. I'm personally convinced that the market approach advocated by the author must be considered by anyone who is involved in the very serious business of speculation. Clearly this book is a classic. I've had it over a decade, read it many times, and find myself in trouble more often than not whan I've forgotten to follow the ideas presented.

This book is not a technical book about the science of trading or speculating. Rather, it presents a compelling and original perspective on the function of speculation in capital markets, and explains what it means to buy low and sell high. Moreover, the book has very little to do with the commodities markets specifically, and a lot to do with general speculating in the financial markets.

The Speculator's Edge is the first book I have read which explains who takes "the other side" of a stock tranaction, and explains why. As a study of the psychology of investors and the market, the book has few peers. Pacelli states the original of this book came from a boast that he could write the best book available on the subject of speculation (and investing) because most books were worthless. He succeeded.

It's a pleasure reading a book that uses everyday language and minimizes the use of trendy buzz-words. The seven chapters are divided logically and go from the general to the specific. This allows the reader to capture the essence of the message without reading long passages before getting to a point. The reader can visualize his own job shop and pick and choose which solutions are pertinent.

Mr. Bozzone's experience and knowledge are evident throughout the book. His viewpoint brings a dimension and a dynamic quality which allows the reader to benefit from the many "real-life" examples peppered throughout the pages. The many models and illustrations help the reader understand the concepts and operational strategies that improve job shop performance.

From a training perspective, Speed to Market provides a sound basis for developing programs that would help people at all levels to understand the intricacies of managing a job shop. The book is an excellent tool for constructing a curriculum that would benefit experienced managers who need to re-think their current situation, as well as people who are new to the job shop environment.

It is clear that owner-operators and managers of job shops would be well served by having their people understand and use the concepts and information presented in this book.

Speed to Market is a "must-read". Speed to Market is an "easy read". Speed to Market should be on your bookshelf! Speed to Market should be on your bookshelf!

Review by Richard B. Mroczek Infoactive Training Group, Montreal, Canada

Speed to Market by Vincent Bozzone is one of those books that is dumbfounding in its practicality. It makes you wonder why more how-to books aren't written this way.

Speed to Market is a refreshing and unique book on "how to cut lead time and increase profits in job shops and custom manufacturing environments." Not only is this one of the few books available on this heretofore ignored topic, it is written as a step-by-step manual for designing and running a profitable job shop, incorporating detailed structure and process elements as they relate to the bottom-line. Actual client studies help make this book even more pragmatic.

Once you read this book, you realize that Vince Bozzone really is a rare expert in job shops and process improvement design.

Review by Kathy Molloy for the Designer's Forum, AMOD Newsletter

It was a bit of a shock for me to read this book, because I had already been exposed to the random walks idea long before I found it. I had already learned about Black-Scholes-Merton and had read about "The Holes in Black-Scholes" (that's the name of a paper by Fischer Black). But here we have a physicist who dissected the ideas of economists (mostly statistical ideas) in the 1960s and 1970s, and anticipated a lot of what has been done since.

Osborne repeatedly picks at assumptions that have tripped up those who blindly misapply BSM, such as the idea of "continuous markets". His section on market making is better than anything else I have read on the subject (though I have not been able to find much on this subject). It illustrates that market makers create the illusion of continuity on a price chart, and for them to function the way they do, the market either must have "down time" or they must be able to halt the market occasionally and restart it (or both).

This book is very rough: it's a collection of lecture notes, and the pictures are drawn by hand. This will make any reader uncomfortable who insists on having everything look like it came out of PowerPoint or Mathematica. Younger readers who don't remember what life was like before computers were common would probably find it quaint.

Osborne was a physicist who observed that stock prices appear to be distributed lognormally. Mandelbrot pointed out a year later (1963) that this can't be true, that price distributions look Paretian, have exponentially decaying tails with infinite standard deviation. However, no one has yet been able to turn Mandelbrot's observation about asymptotics of market prices into trading rules (what are the dynamics?). In contrast, the Black-Scholes model, the mathematics of derivatives and option-pricing, follows from the lognormal approximation (see Hull, e.g.). Traders who make money apparently don't use academic option pricing theory (it underprices out of the money trades), but texts and scads of academic papers are written using it because no one knows how to do anything else yet.

Lognormality is the last part of Osborne's book. The first chapters are even more interesting. There, Osborne tears the 'mathemology' of Samuelson's Economics text to shreds by pointing out that the famous supply-demand curve can't be constructed from any sort of data. The main point is that price does not exist as a function of either supply or demand. Example: suppose that 25 tomatoes are available (supply). What's the price? Answer: anything or nothing (nonuniqueness). Even better, Osborne shows that one can obtain data on both supply and demand as a function of price, so that discrete (noncontinuous) supply and demand curves can be plotted for a given commodity in a given market. What a pity that Osborne did not set his mind to discussing 'utility', because (as Mirowski points out in "More heat than light) the differential form that defines utility is generally nonintegrable, meaning that utility dooes not exist. Samuelson wrote papers trying to get around this in the 50's, but the correct underpinning of General Equilibrium Theory was never established. Osborne rightfully points out that people who believe in the approximation of continous price changes and efficient markets are grist for the mill of traders who use just the opposite assumptions to make money off them every day.

I wish that economics students would be required to read Osborne and Mirowski, but that isn't likely to happen. Meanwhile, the Fed keeps hiring those guys to crunch questionable numbers using the CAPM and similar stuff.

This book was written in the early 30s, and the ironic thing is that everything he writes about is still true. There is something for everyone in this book, long term, short term and beginning investors. The author discusses money management, strategy, and investor psychology. I read quite a few books on the market, and there are very few that in my opinion deserve a 5 star rating.

I bought this book largely because it had been rated by Sunday Financial Times of London as "one of the 10 best investment books of all time". I was not disappointed. It was written in 1934. After reading it, one would realize that the stock market has not really changed much after all these years. People today still make the same mistakes as the traders did almost 70 years ago. Unless you learn and pay close attention to the advice given in this book, none of the sophisticated technical indicators of the present day is going to help you because, as we all know, human nature and emotion do play a very important part in the trading game. Amongst the several hundred investments books I have read so far, this book is certainly one of the best. So read it (as well as "How to Trade in Stocks" by Jesse Livermore) and learn the "rules" as these rules are going to save you a lot of money in trading.

This book is as relevant today as it was when published in 1973 and should be in the library of every trader.

Gerald Appel, veteran trader, and the man responsible for making the MACD indicator popular, shares his systems knowledge in this text. It begins with a critique of various moving average systems (good for trending markets) with a constant attention to actual trading results in the real world. He goes on to discuss "swing" based systems that are better suited for a choppy, trading market (non-trending) concentrating on an overbought/oversold oscillator. Some other systems are also examined including channel breakouts. The final chapters deal with Appel's own system which combines rules for using moving averages during trending markets, switching to oscillators for trading markets. The rules are clearly spelled out and can be applied as a purely mechanical system if desired. I haven't backtested the system myself, but Appel provides theoretical results for a time period in the 1970s when the NYSE managed little gain on buy and hold over a multiyear period. The system yielded spectacular results in the same time period excluding dividends (and commission costs, but the # of trades is not excessive and online brokers have lessened this concern). The only downside to the book is that it was written in 1980, and I haven't backtested results for the 1980s and 90s. He does however provide an excellent detailed explanation of the reasoning behind the system. I would recommend this book to both novice and intermediate systems developers. I am interested in trying the system itself, but the book goes along way in providing a background on how to approach systems development and the types of questions to think about. I found it much more practical (although nowhere near as comprehensive) than Kaufman's famous bible on trading systems.

This book was easy to read and it really flowed well. This book changed my investing approach forever because it has me better prepared before I enter a trade. I can anticipate what a stock is going to do before it does it. I hope Mr. Hooper writes another book on trading in the stock market. I have read this book two times already.

I highly recommend this book to anyone that is trading stocks or considering trading stocks.
This book describes a whole new way to trade stocks. It shows you how and when to buy, hold, and sell stocks buy letting the stock its self tell you what to do.

I really like the concept of using events that are in each stock and the market as your guide. I found the event concept so easy I don't know why I did not think of it my self. I also found the chapter on market psychology very interesting.