If you have not yet bought the original copy, make sure to purchase it before buying this unofficial summary from aBookaDay. SPECIAL OFFER $2.99 (Regularly priced: $3.99) OVERVIEW This review of The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis provides a chapter by chapter detailed summary followed by an analysis and critique of the strengths and weaknesses of the book. The main theme explored in the book is how corruption and greed in Wall Street caused the crash of the subprime mortgage market in 2008. Despite being completely preventable, the big firms in Wall Street chose to ignore the oncoming fall in favor of making money. Michael Lewis introduces characters—men outside of the Wall Street machine—who foresaw the crisis and, through several different techniques, were able to predict how and when the market would fall. Lewis portrays these men—Steve Eisman, Mike Burry, Charlie Ledley, and Jamie Mai—as the underdogs, who were able to understand and act upon the obvious weaknesses in the subprime market. Lewis’s overall point is to demonstrate how the Wall Street firms were manipulating the market. They used loans to cash in on the desperation of middle-to-lower class Americans, and then ultimately relied on the government to bail them out when the loans were defaulted. Using anecdotes and interviews from the men who were involved first-hand, the author makes the case that Wall Street, and how they conducted business in regards to the subprime mortgage market, is truly corrupt beyond repair, and the men he profiles in this novel were trying to make the best out of a bad situation. By having the words from the sources themselves, this demonstrates Lewis’s search for the truth behind what actually happened. Ultimately, we as an audience can not be sure if the intentions of these underdogs were truly good, but Lewis does an admirable job presenting as many sides to the story as possible. The central thesis of the work is that the subprime mortgage crisis was caused by Wall Street firms pushing fraudulent loans upon middle-to-lower class Americans that they would essentially not be able to afford. Several people outside of Wall Street were able to predict a crash in the market when these loans would be defaulted on, and bought insurance to bet against the market (essentially, buying short). Over a time period from roughly 2005-2008, the market crashed and huge banks and firms lost billions of dollars, filed for bankruptcy, or were bailed out by the government. These men, the characters of Lewis’s novel, were able to bet against the loans and made huge amounts of money, but it was not quite an easy journey. Michael Lewis is a non-fiction author and financial journalist. He has written several novels—notably Liar’s Poker in 1989, Moneyball in 2003, and The Blind Side in 2006. Born in New Orleans, he attended Princeton University, receiving a BA degree in Art History. After attending London School of Economics and receiving his masters there, he was hired by Salomon Brothers where he experienced much about what he wrote about in Liar’s Poker. He is currently married, with three children and lives in Berkeley, California. SUMMARY PROLOGUE: POLTERGEIST Michael Lewis begins his tale of the remarkable—and strange—men who predicted the immense fall of the housing market by immediately exposing himself as the exact opposite type of person from them. He explains to the reader that he has no background in accounting, business, or money managing.

    Mellon, the American colossus who bestrode the worlds of industry, government, and philanthropy, leaving his transformative stamp on each. Following a boyhood in nineteenth-century Pittsburgh, during which he learned from his Scotch-Irish immigrant father the lessons of self-sufficiency and accumulation of wealth, Andrew Mellon overcame painful shyness to become one of America’s greatest financiers. Across an unusually diverse range of enterprises, from banking to oil to aluminum manufacture, he would build a legendary personal fortune, tracking America’s course to global economic supremacy. Personal happiness, however, eluded him: his loveless marriage at forty-five to a British girl less than half his age ended in a scandalous divorce, and for all his best efforts, he would remain a stranger to his children. He had been bred to do one thing, and that he did with brilliant and innovative entrepreneurship. The Mellon way was to hold companies closely, including such iconic enterprises as Alcoa and Gulf Oil. Collecting art, a pursuit inspired by his close friend Henry Clay Frick, would become his only nonprofessional gratification. And by the end of his life, Mellon’s “pictures” would constitute one of the world’s foremost private collections.Mellon’s wealth and name allowed him to dominate Pennsylvania politics, and late in life he was invited to Washington. As treasury secretary under presidents Harding, Coolidge, and finally Hoover, he made the federal government run like a business—prefiguring the public official as CEO. But this man of straightforward conservative politics was no politician. He would be hailed as the architect of the Roaring Twenties, but, staying too long, would be blamed for the Great Depression, eventually to find himself a broken idol. The New Deal overthrew Andrew Mellon’s every fiscal assumption, starting with the imperative of balanced budgets. Indeed, he would become the emblem—and the scapegoat—for the Republican conviction and policy that the role of government is to help business create national wealth and jobs. At the age of seventy-nine, the former treasury secretary suffered the ultimate humiliation: prosecution by FDR’s government on charges of tax evasion. In the end Mellon would be exonerated, as he always trusted he would be, and throughout the trial, which lasted more than a year, he never abandoned what had become his last dream: to make a great gift to the American people. The National Gallery of Art remains his most tangible legacy, although he did not live to see its completion.The issues Andrew W. Mellon confronted—concerning government, business, influence, the individual and the public good—remain at the center of our national discourse to this day. Indeed, the positions he steadfastly held reemerged relatively intact with the Reagan revolution, having lain dormant since the New Deal. David Cannadine’s magisterial biography brings to life a towering, controversial figure, casting new light on our history and the evolution of our public values.

    Money Wise shows you the way. It cuts through the clutter of jargon and technical terms, leading you step by step on how to grow wealthy. In it, you will learn: Ways of allocating your income The only mutual funds hack worth knowing Why you should be watching not what Warren Buffett says but what he does Written in Shenoy’s trademark style, Money Wise is a book as much fun to read as it is informative. If you want to start investing, this is the book for you. If you have already started, then read this and up your game.

    In Finding and Funding Great Deals, seasoned real estate agent and investor Anson Young guides you through his tried and true methods for finding deals in any market. Inside, he outlines his own methods as well as other techniques to help new and seasoned investors alike improve their real estate business. This is not a magic pill that will turn you in to a successful investor overnight; instead this is a practical guide to several approaches to use in each step of your real estate deal finding journey. Hard work required (but not included with the purchase of this book). Inside, you will learn: Inside, you’ll discover: Marketing methods Several analysis techniques Funding approaches How to help others through pain points Negotiation techniques How to build your business so you can do it all over again.

    No confusing jargon. No unnecessary mumbo-jumbo. Just clear, easy-to-understand explanations of more than 40 of the most popular option strategies broken down into a play-by-play format including: Play Name: Long Call, Short Call Spread, Iron Condor, etc. The Setup: The goals and reasons to run each play Who Should Run It: Rookies, Veterans or All-Stars, based on degree of difficulty When To Run It: Describes each play as bullish, bearish or neutral The Strategy: A detailed overview of each strategy, their risks and the specific costs associated with multi-leg strategies. description For the first-time option trader The Options Playbook features a "Rookie's Corner," addressing the basic definitions and concepts you need to understand this market, tips to avoid common beginner's mistakes, and suggested strategies to "get your feet wet." For more experienced option traders, an expanded section on implied volatility explains how this handy variable can be used to find the potential range of the stock over the options life. A detailed section on pricing variables (Greeks) helps you understand how an option's price is affected by changes in market conditions. You will also learn how time decay and a change in implied volatility can affect your trade after it's in place and how to recover if things don't go according to plan. The Options Playbook features Options Guy Tips from TradeKing Senior Analyst Brian Overby. Like any good coach, Overby's handy insights help you put theory into successful real-world trading. This expanded 2nd edition includes 10 new plays and 56 new pages of handy content describing a brief history of options, five common mistakes options traders make and how to avoid them, an expanded glossary, how to manage option positions by rolling to a different month and strike, to explaining the difference between index and stock options, managing early exercise and assignment and how to calculate position delta and use it to manage overall position risk of a multi-leg option strategy. Options involve risk and are not suitable for all investors. It is possible to lose more money than invested. Before making any investment decisions, please read Characteristics and Risks of Standardized Options that accompanies The Options Playbook and available at: tradeking.com/ODD. (c) 2015 TradeKing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. Securities offered through TradeKing, LLC, member FINRA and SIPC.

    The book's essays engage the public discussion about basic structural changes and systemic alternatives needed to fix today's broken economy.

    Most economists would agree that a thriving economy is synonymous with GDP growth. The more we produce and consume, the higher our living standard and the more resources available to the public. This means that our current era, in which growth has slowed substantially from its postwar highs, has raised alarm bells. But should it? Is growth actually the best way to measure economic success—and does our slowdown indicate economic problems? The counterintuitive answer Dietrich Vollrath offers is: No. Looking at the same facts as other economists, he offers a radically different interpretation. Rather than a sign of economic failure, he argues, our current slowdown is, in fact, a sign of our widespread economic success. Our powerful economy has already supplied so much of the necessary stuff of modern life, brought us so much comfort, security, and luxury, that we have turned to new forms of production and consumption that increase our well-being but do not contribute to growth in GDP. In Fully Grown, Vollrath offers a powerful case to support that argument. He explores a number of important trends in the US economy: including a decrease in the number of workers relative to the population, a shift from a goods-driven economy to a services-driven one, and a decline in geographic mobility. In each case, he shows how their economic effects could be read as a sign of success, even though they each act as a brake of GDP growth.  He also reveals what growth measurement can and cannot tell us—which factors are rightly correlated with economic success, which tell us nothing about significant changes in the economy, and which fall into a conspicuously gray area. Sure to be controversial, Fully Grown will reset the terms of economic debate and help us think anew about what a successful economy looks like.

    Their brand-new two- or three-person start-ups are given a seemingly impossible challenge: to turn a raw idea into a viable business, fast.   Each YC session culminates in a demo day, when investors and venture capitalists flock to hear pitches from the new graduates. Any one of them might turn out to be the next Dropbox (class of 2007, now valued at $5 billion) or Airbnb (2009, $1.3 billion).   Randall Stross is the first journalist to have fly-on-the-wall access to Y Combinator. He tells the full story of how Paul Graham started this ultra exclusive institution, how it chooses among hundreds of aspiring Mark Zuckerbergs, and how it teaches them to go from concept to profitability in record time.

    This book is in used good condition, There is a small stain o the back page and bottom of book

    The lectures are the culmination of a lifetime of practical and philosophical reflection. In the first and second lecture, Soros discusses his general theory of reflexivity and its application to financial markets, providing insight into the recent financial crisis. The third and fourth lectures examine the concept of open society, which has guided Soros' global philanthropy, as well as the potential for conflict between capitalism and open society. The closing lecture focuses on the way ahead, closely examining the increasingly important economic and political role that China will play in the future. "The Budapest Lectures" presents these five seminal talks into one volume, which offers a condensed and highly readable summary of Soros' world view.

    But often, a company's published accounts offer clues to impending disaster, providing you know where to look. Through the forensic examination of more than 20 recent stock market disasters, Tim Steer reveals how companies hide or disguise worrying facts about the robustness of their business. In his lively style, he looks at the themes that underlie the ways companies hide the truth and he stresses that in an assessment of a company's accounts, investors should always bear in mind that the only fact is cash; everything else - profit, assets, etc - is a matter of opinion. Full of invaluable lessons for investors, the book concludes with some trenchant observations on what is wrong in the worlds of investment, audit and financial regulation, and what changes should be introduced.

    Or it can be a way to lose your shirt. What determines whether you get rich or go broke can often be a tiny detail here, a missed opportunity there. The margin for error is slim. Heck, it’s non-existent. Fortunes are amassed by experienced options traders who know how to use this strategy THE RIGHT WAY. And financial lives are destroyed by those who don’t. This book will catapult you into that first category. Without all the fluff and B.S. that you don’t need. The Bullsh*t Free Guide to Iron Condors is a TRUE no-nonsense guide to the Iron Condor strategy, written by an experienced trader who lives (or dies) by working it every day. It’s designed as a real-life, step-by-step guide for experienced options traders who want to use this strategy the RIGHT WAY -- which means the CONSISTENTLY PROFITABLE way. In the book you’ll discover: * 6 little-known techniques for adjusting trades that go bad (most experienced traders don’t even know these) * How to create a trading journal and trading log, and why it’s CRUCIAL that you do. (Note: the book includes downloadable examples you can use yourself.) * The 3 ways the world’s top Iron Condor traders manage risk, including detailed examples so you can trade “like the big boys.” * How to save yourself thousands of dollars when entering live trades (this information is closely guarded by many trading “gurus”). * Which option broker is the best for trading Iron Condors. (This is one of the most important decisions you’ll make, so choose wisely.) * How to set up a trading plan that actually works. (We include a sample trading plan to get you started.) * Why weekly options are not as amazing as they sound (and are, in fact, often a HUGE mistake). * How to incorporate volatility into your trading. (You will come to LOVE huge volatility moves after reading this!) * How to eliminate the risk of early assignment. * How to avoid being caught with your pants down on settlement day. (Make this mistake and you can kiss your profits goodbye.)

    Anthony Bolton, the UK s most successful stock market investor, tells the story of his contrarian approach to managing money. He provides invaluable lessons on the factors that really matter in picking a stock: the need to identify good managers, how to run a portfolio, the importance of value investing, reading charts and how to trade successfully.It s not easy to continually buy low and sell high. This book gives clear directions for doing well in the stock market, and doing well consistently. Investing Against the Tide shows you how to make the right decisions at the right time.Anthony Bolton is considered the UK s most successful stock market investor and fund manager. Over twenty five years he delivered a market-beating return of 20% in his Fidelity Special Situations Fund. How did he do it, and what can you learn from him?In Investing Against the Tide, Anthony Bolton tells the story of his contrarian approach to managing money. He provides invaluable lessons on the factors that really matter when investing: how to pick a stock, the need to identify good managers, how to run a portfolio, the importance of value investing, reading charts and how to trade successfully.In this account of financial accomplishment, Bolton reveals the secrets of his success. It s not easy constantly to buy low and sell high and this book gives clear directions for doing well in the stock market, and doing well consistently. Chapter by chapter Investing Against the Tide shows you how to make the right decisions at the right time and featured key lessons show you how you really can learn from a life running money.Investing Against the Tideis an authoritative guide for investment professionals, offering them a rare insight into what it really takes to run money in a top-performing fund, as well as providing amateur investors the chance to learn the stock-picking strategies from a leading money-manager. About the authorAnthony Bolton left Cambridge University with a degree in engineering to begin a career in the City. He started as a graduate trainee working for Keyser Ullmann in 1971 before taking up a full time position as an assistant in their investment department. In 1976 he moved to Schlesingers where he became, for the first time, an investment manager. In 1979, aged 29, he was recruited by Fidelity, the international fund management group, as one of its first London-based investment managers, a move that proved to be the launch of a long and successful career. In surveys of professional investors, he is regularly voted the fund manager most respected by his peers. He retired from full-time investment management at the end of 2007, but continues to work at Fidelity as a mentor of the analysts and younger fund managers as well as being involved in overseeing Fidelity s investment process. His hobby is composing classical music. Anthony Bolton is married with three children and lives in West Sussex."

    These are stocks that return $100 for every $1 invested. That means a $10,000 investment turns into $1 million. Chris Mayer can help you find them. It sounds like an outrageous quest with a wildly improbable chance of success. But when Mayer studied 100-baggers of the past, definite patterns emerged. In 100-Baggers, you will learn: -The key characteristics of 100-baggers -Why anybody can do this (It is truly an everyman's approach. You don't need an MBA or a finance degree. Some basic financial concepts are all you need.) -A number of crutches or techniques that can help you get more out of your stocks and investing The emphasis is always on the practical, so there are many stories and anecdotes to help illustrate important points. You should read this book if you want to get more out of your stocks. Even if you never get a 100-bagger, this book will help you turn up big winners and keep you away from losers and sleepy stocks that go nowhere. After reading 100-Baggers, you will never look at investing the same way again. It will energize and excite you about what is possible.

    Learn how to:Understand feelings that impact taking financial action Develop understanding and knowledge about money Eliminate stress and anxiety around money Let go of old patterns and painful habits Approach money tasks with energy and optimism Design a money life that is fulfilling both financially and spirituallyFilled with practical information, market-tested, wealth-building skills, personal success stories, and spiritual guidance, The Seven Stages of Money Maturity is an invaluable guide to a rich--and richly lived--life.1. Innocence--The childhood state we are born in, devoid of any concept of money2. Pain--The discovery that we have more money than some and less than others, and that work is necessary to make a living3. Knowledge--The intellectual task of learning financial techniques such as saving, budgeting, and investing4. Understanding--The emotional work done in coming to terms with feelings around money, such as greed, envy, and resentment (which are rooted in Pain)5. Vigor--The energy (physical, emotional, and spiritual) that must be expended to reach financial goals6. Vision--The direction of Vigor outward toward the health and welfare of communities, with or without profit motive7. Aloha--The compassionate goodwill that allows one to use money to perform acts of kindness without expecting anything in returnUsing THE SEVEN STAGES OF MONEY MATURITY, readers will understand each encounter with money as a step toward awakening; a lesson about the relationship they share with others as well as with the self.