An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations


Adam Smith - 1776
    Written in clear and incisive prose, The Wealth of Nations articulates the concepts indispensable to an understanding of contemporary society; and Robert Reich's Introduction both clarifies Smith's analyses and illuminates his overall relevance to the world in which we live. As Reich writes, "Smith's mind ranged over issues as fresh and topical today as they were in the late eighteenth century--jobs, wages, politics, government, trade, education, business, and ethics."Introduction by Robert Reich - Commentary by R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner - Includes a Modern Library Reading Group Guide

Valuation: Measuring and Managing the Value of Companies


Tim Koller - 1990
    Valuation provides up-to-date insights and practical advice on how to create, manage, and measure an organization's value. Along with all-new case studies that illustrate how valuation techniques and principles are applied in real-world situations, this comprehensive guide has been updated to reflect the events of the Internet bubble and its effect on stock markets, new developments in academic finance, changes in accounting rules (both U. S. and IFRS), and an enhanced global perspective. This edition contains the solid framework that managers at all levels, investors, and students have come to trust.

The End of Alchemy: Money, Banking, and the Future of the Global Economy


Mervyn A. King - 2016
    We all sense that, but Mervyn King knows it firsthand; his ten years at the helm of the Bank of England, including at the height of the financial crisis, revealed profound truths about the mechanisms of our capitalist society. In The End of Alchemy he offers us an essential work about the history and future of money and banking, the keys to modern finance.The Industrial Revolution built the foundation of our modern capitalist age. Yet the flowering of technological innovations during that dynamic period relied on the widespread adoption of two much older ideas: the creation of paper money and the invention of banks that issued credit. We take these systems for granted today, yet at their core both ideas were revolutionary and almost magical. Common paper became as precious as gold, and risky long-term loans were transformed into safe short-term bank deposits. As King argues, this is financial alchemy—the creation of extraordinary financial powers that defy reality and common sense. Faith in these powers has led to huge benefits; the liquidity they create has fueled economic growth for two centuries now. However, they have also produced an unending string of economic disasters, from hyperinflations to banking collapses to the recent global recession and current stagnation.How do we reconcile the potent strengths of these ideas with their inherent weaknesses? King draws on his unique experience to present fresh interpretations of these economic forces and to point the way forward for the global economy. His bold solutions cut through current overstuffed and needlessly complex legislation to provide a clear path to durable prosperity and the end of overreliance on the alchemy of our financial ancestors.

Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics


Richard H. Thaler - 2016
    Thaler has spent his career studying the radical notion that the central agents in the economy are humans—predictable, error-prone individuals. Misbehaving is his arresting, frequently hilarious account of the struggle to bring an academic discipline back down to earth—and change the way we think about economics, ourselves, and our world.Traditional economics assumes rational actors. Early in his research, Thaler realized these Spock-like automatons were nothing like real people. Whether buying a clock radio, selling basketball tickets, or applying for a mortgage, we all succumb to biases and make decisions that deviate from the standards of rationality assumed by economists. In other words, we misbehave. More importantly, our misbehavior has serious consequences. Dismissed at first by economists as an amusing sideshow, the study of human miscalculations and their effects on markets now drives efforts to make better decisions in our lives, our businesses, and our governments.Coupling recent discoveries in human psychology with a practical understanding of incentives and market behavior, Thaler enlightens readers about how to make smarter decisions in an increasingly mystifying world. He reveals how behavioral economic analysis opens up new ways to look at everything from household finance to assigning faculty offices in a new building, to TV game shows, the NFL draft, and businesses like Uber.Laced with antic stories of Thaler’s spirited battles with the bastions of traditional economic thinking, Misbehaving is a singular look into profound human foibles. When economics meets psychology, the implications for individuals, managers, and policy makers are both profound and entertaining.

How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities


John Cassidy - 2009
    Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009.

A Beginner's Guide to the Stock Market: Everything You Need to Start Making Money Today


Matthew R. Kratter - 2019
     Are you ready to get your piece of it? This book will teach you everything that you need to know to start making money in the stock market today. Don't gamble with your hard-earned money. If you are going to make a lot of money, you need to know how the stock market really works. You need to avoid the pitfalls and costly mistakes that beginners make. And you need time-tested trading and investing strategies that actually work. This book gives you everything that you will need. It's a simple road map that anyone can follow. In this book, you will learn: How to grow your money the smart and easy way The best place to open up a brokerage account How to buy your first stock How to generate passive income in the stock market How to spot a stock that is about to explode higher How to trade momentum stocks Insider tricks used by professional traders The one thing you should never do when buying value stocks (don't start investing until you read this) How to pick stocks like Warren Buffett How to create a secure financial future for you and your family And much, much more Even if you know nothing at all about the stock market, this book will get you started investing and trading the right way. Join the thousands of smart traders and investors who have profited from this ultimate guide to the stock market. Amazon best-selling author and retired hedge fund manager, Matthew Kratter will teach you the secrets that he has used to trade and invest profitably for the last 20 years. Even if you are a complete beginner, this book will have you trading stocks in no time. Are you ready to get started creating real wealth in the stock market? Then scroll up and click BUY NOW to get started today.

Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco


Bryan Burrough - 1989
    An enduring masterpiece of investigative journalism by Bryan Burrough and John Helyar, it includes a new afterword by the authors that brings this remarkable story of greed and double-dealings up to date twenty years after the famed deal. The Los Angeles Times calls Barbarians at the Gate, “Superlative.” The Chicago Tribune raves, “It’s hard to imagine a better story...and it’s hard to imagine a better account.” And in an era of spectacular business crashes and federal bailouts, it still stands as a valuable cautionary tale that must be heeded.

Extreme Money: Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk


Satyajit Das - 2011
    In "Extreme Money," best-selling author and global finance expert Satyajit Das tells how this happened and what it means. Das reveals the spectacular, dangerous money games that are generating increasingly massive bubbles of fake growth, prosperity, and wealth--while endangering the jobs, possessions, and futures of virtually everyone outside finance. ..".virtually in a category of its own -- part history, part book of financial quotations, part cautionary tale, part textbook. It contains some of the clearest charts about risk transfer you will find anywhere. ...Others have laid out the dire consequences of financialisation ("the conversion of everything into monetary form," in Das's phrase), but few have done it with a wider or more entertaining range of references...[Extreme Money] does... reach an important, if worrying, conclusion: financialisation may be too deep-rooted to be torn out. As Das puts it -- characteristically borrowing a line from a movie, Inception -- "the hardest virus to kill is an idea." -Andrew Hill "Eclectic Guide to the Excesses of the Crisis" ""Financial Times ""(August 17, 2011) Extreme Money named to the longlist for the 2011 FT and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year award.

Devil Take the Hindmost: A History of Financial Speculation


Edward Chancellor - 1996
    A lively, original, and challenging history of stock market speculation from the 17th century to present day.Is your investment in that new Internet stock a sign of stock market savvy or an act of peculiarly American speculative folly? How has the psychology of investing changed--and not changed--over the last five hundred years? In Devil Take the Hindmost, Edward Chancellor traces the origins of the speculative spirit back to ancient Rome and chronicles its revival in the modern world: from the tulip scandal of 1630s Holland, to "stockjobbing" in London's Exchange Alley, to the infamous South Sea Bubble of 1720, which prompted Sir Isaac Newton to comment, "I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people."Here are brokers underwriting risks that included highway robbery and the "assurance of female chastity"; credit notes and lottery tickets circulating as money; wise and unwise investors from Alexander Pope and Benjamin Disraeli to Ivan Boesky and Hillary Rodham Clinton.From the Gilded Age to the Roaring Twenties, from the nineteenth century railway mania to the crash of 1929, from junk bonds and the Japanese bubble economy to the day-traders of the Information Era, Devil Take the Hindmost tells a fascinating story of human dreams and folly through the ages.

Investment Banking for Dummies


Matthew Krantz - 2014
    Topics include: Strategies for risk management, such as market, credit, operating, reputation, legal, and funding riskKey investment banking operations including: venture capital and buyouts, Merger & Acquisitions services, equity underwriting, debt, underwriting securitization, financial engineering, investment management, and securities servicesThe latest information on competition and government regulationsRelationships between leveraged buyout (LBO) funds, hedge funds, and corporate and institutional clients

Smart Women Finish Rich: 9 Steps to Achieving Financial Security and Funding Your Dreams


David Bach - 1998
    Whether you’re working with a few dollars a week or a significant inheritance, Bach’s nine-step program gives you tools for spending wisely, establishing security, and aligning money with your values. Plus, in this completely revised and updated edition, David Bach includes critical new long-term investment advice, information on teaching your kids about money, Internet resources, and new ways to attract greater wealth–personal and financial–into your life.

Rule #1: The Simple Strategy for Successful Investing in Only 15 Minutes a Week!


Phil Town - 2006
    As a guy who barely made a living as a river guide, I considered the whole process pretty impenetrable, and I was convinced that to do it right you had to make it a full-time job. Me, I was more interested in having full-time fun.So I was tempted to do what you’re probably doing right now: letting some mutual fund manager worry about growing your nest egg. Let me tell you why that decision could one day make you absolutely miserable. The fact is, because of natural market cycles, the mutual fund industry is likely to soon be facing twenty years of flat returns. That means that if you’ve got your nest egg tucked away in funds—especially the type found in most 401ks—your egg won’t get much bigger than it is now. Translation: Get ready for a retirement filled with lots of cold cuts, plenty of quality TV-watching time, and a place to live that’s too small to accommodate your visiting kids.In this book I’ll show you how I turned $1,000 into $1 million in only five years, and then proceeded to make many millions more. I came to investing as a person who wasn’t great at math, possessed zero extra cash, and wanted a life—not an extra three hours of work to do every day.Fortunately, I was introduced to The Rule.Rule #1, as famed investor Warren Buffett will tell you, is don’t lose money. Through an intriguing process that I’ll clarify in this book, not losing money results in making more money than you ever imagined. What it comes down to is buying shares of companies only when the numbers—and the intangibles—are on your side. If that sounds too good to be true, it’s because the mind-set I’ll be introducing you to leads not to bets but to certainties. Believe me, if there were anything genius-level about this, I’d still be a river guide collecting unemployment much of the year.Part of the secret is thinking of yourself as a business owner rather than a stock investor. Part is taking advantage of today’s new Internet tools, which drastically reduce the “homework factor.” (We’re talking a few minutes, tops.) Part is knowing the only five numbers that really count in valuing a potential investment. And part—maybe the most important part—is using the risk-free Rule #1 approach to consistently pay a mere 50 cents to buy a dollar’s worth of a business.What I won’t waste your time with is fluff: a lot of vague parables reminding you of what you already know and leaving you exactly where you started. This is the real deal, folks: a start-to-finish, one-baby-step-at-a-time approach that will allow you to retire ten years sooner than you planned, with more creature comforts than you ever imagined.Also available as a Random House AudioBook and eBook.

Long-Term Secrets to Short-Term Trading


Larry R. Williams - 1999
    With his expert guidance, you'll learn about such fundamentals as how the market moves, what are the three most dominant cycles, when to exit a trade, and how to hold on to winners until the end of your chosen time frame. Along with in-depth analysis of the most effective short-term trading strategies and details on the best theory and implementation of money management, Long-Term Secrets to Short-Term Trading features Williams's winning technical indicators, as well as his thoughts on a broad range of topics. Here is a sampling: * "A short-term trader has one objective; to catch the current trend of the market. That's it. That's all you should try to do!" * "The shorter your time frame of trading the less money you'll make." * "You will never make big money until you learn to hold on to your winners, and the longer you hold the more potential you have for profiteering. . . . It takes time to make money regardless of the activity." * "Wealth is not amassed with just good market calls. It also requires correct money management." * "I think you need to fear the market and fear yourself. . . . Without fear there is no respect, if you do not respect the markets and fear yourself you will become one more dead body on the long trail of commodity market casualties scattered across the land." Filled with invaluable insight, precise rules and formulas, and helpful advice from one of today's most respected market players, this comprehensive and practical resource will serve as the basis for, if not indeed become, your short-term trading "gospel."

The Ten-Day MBA : A Step-By-Step Guide To Mastering The Skills Taught In America's Top Business Schools


Steven Silbiger - 1993
    Features chapters on finance, marketing, accounting, strategy, quantitative analysis, operations, economics, organisational behaviour, and ethics, all revised to reflect the contemporary corporate culture and economic climate.

The $100 Startup: Reinvent the Way You Make a Living, Do What You Love, and Create a New Future


Chris Guillebeau - 2012
      Still in his early thirties, Chris is on the verge of completing a tour of every country on earth – he’s already visited more than 175 nations – and yet he’s never held a “real job” or earned a regular paycheck.  Rather, he has a special genius for turning ideas into income, and he uses what he earns both to support his life of adventure and to give back.    There are many others like Chris – those who’ve found ways to opt out of traditional employment and create the time and income to pursue what they find meaningful.  Sometimes, achieving that perfect blend of passion and income doesn’t depend on shelving what you currently do.  You can start small with your venture, committing little time or money, and wait to take the real plunge when you're sure it's successful.   In preparing to write this book, Chris identified 1,500 individuals who have built businesses earning $50,000 or more from a modest investment (in many cases, $100 or less), and from that group he’s chosen to focus on the 50 most intriguing case studies.  In nearly all cases, people with no special skills discovered aspects of their personal passions that could be monetized, and were able to restructure their lives in ways that gave them greater freedom and fulfillment.   Here, finally, distilled into one easy-to-use guide, are the most valuable lessons from those who’ve learned how to turn what they do into a gateway to self-fulfillment.  It’s all about finding the intersection between your “expertise” – even if you don’t consider it such -- and what other people will pay for.  You don’t need an MBA, a business plan or even employees.  All you need is a product or service that springs from what you love to do anyway, people willing to pay, and a way to get paid.   Not content to talk in generalities, Chris tells you exactly how many dollars his group of unexpected entrepreneurs required to get their projects up and running; what these individuals did in the first weeks and months to generate significant cash; some of the key mistakes they made along the way, and the crucial insights that made the business stick.  Among Chris’s key principles: if you’re good at one thing, you’re probably good at something else; never teach a man to fish – sell him the fish instead; and in the battle between planning and action, action wins.   In ancient times, people who were dissatisfied with their lives dreamed of finding magic lamps, buried treasure, or streets paved with gold.  Today, we know that it’s up to us to change our lives.  And the best part is, if we change our own life, we can help others change theirs.  This remarkable book will start you on your way.