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“Project Management for Profit” by Knight, Thomas and Angus – a Book Review

There are many books for project management on the market nowadays, as this turns into a profession. So why, would you ask, would somebody bother to write one more? The answer is simple – because none is perfect.

This is not to say that “Project Management for Profit” is the perfect book! However, it covers an important existing gap in the market, namely the “get to the practical basics in PM”. “Project Management for Profit” talks about the practical aspects of managing a project under tight deadlines, with multiple stakeholders and quite a few problems. In other words, the book goes for project management as it happens in reality, not in the theory.Read More »“Project Management for Profit” by Knight, Thomas and Angus – a Book Review

“Playing to Win – How Strategy Really Works” by A.G. Lafley and Roger L. Martin – a Book Review

Strategy books are so many this year, that you could literally by a dozen by the 10 dollar bill from Amazon. I would go so far as even to say that there are too many. So many strategy tomes are written, that the authors are no longer named “authors”, but “thinkers”, as a new job description… And classified accordingly. (top 50 thinkers, year by year).
“Playing to Win – How Strategy Really Works” (to give the book’s complete name) is actually a very different book in this respect. First of all, “Playing to Win” is written from a practitioner’s perspective. Both authors (A.G. Lafley – by the way, you should buy the book at least for the nice haircut of this gentleman  – and Roger Martin) have created this strategic decision making system during their working life. Actually the system described here was literally applied and developed within Procter & gamble, a fairly successful company overall and a very successful one if e take out the tech sector in the last decade :).

Secondly, the book is written as a Harvard Business Review mega study case. Read More »“Playing to Win – How Strategy Really Works” by A.G. Lafley and Roger L. Martin – a Book Review

“Why I Left Goldman Sachs: A Wall Street Story” by Greg Smith – A Book Review

A search on Google for Goldman Sachs returns 328 million results. Created in 1869, Goldman Sachs rose quickly to be a favorite banks in the US for IPO’s and later for investment banking. Its history was always tied to acquisitions of trading funds and various financial instruments. And of course, during the sub-prime crisis in 2007, Goldman Sachs became even more famous for short-selling mortgage backed securities right before the market for those instruments collapsed. A close competitor of Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs allegedly partly maneuvered its sibling into bankruptcy, thus securing an even better position in the investment banking industry. With $29 billion in assets and a surprising repurchase of the government injection of cash into its share, Goldman Sachs remains one of the most mysterious investment banks on Earth.

No wonder that Greg Smith’s financial book (“Why I Left Goldman Sachs: A Wall Street Story”) was expected with so much interest. As an ex-employee of the bank’s New York HQ, Smith was always critical of Goldman Sachs failing its own standards and the bank’s reference of customers such as “muppets” – after he left the bank in 2006. Thus, it comes as no surprise that this account of an investment banker’s life in Sachs is … well… critical of it. It is also not surprising that the book made the no.1 spot for most book retailers, including Amazon.Read More »“Why I Left Goldman Sachs: A Wall Street Story” by Greg Smith – A Book Review

Book Review: “The Handbook of Trading Strategies for Navigating and Profiting from Currency, Bond, and Stock Markets”

Author: Greg N. Gregoriou

This is a book I enjoyed reading. Compared to some other arid titles in finance, “The Handbook of Trading Strategies for Navigating and Profiting from Currency, Bond, and Stock Markets” represents a change in approach which I appreciated.
Why? Well, the answer comes in relatively easy. “The Handbook of Trading Strategies” is not an academic book which takes you painfully slow chapter by chapter through the arid domain of the trading theory. On contrary, Gregoriou has put together a thick handbook of case studies from which various authors derive generalized conclusions about trading on various market environments.
Each chapter is actually a case study in one trading domain. Authors apply their specific knowledge to various topics, such as arbitrating the various currency markets (Chapter 17. Disparity of USD Interbank Interest Rates in Hong Kong and Singapore: Is There Any Arbitrage Opportunity), applied technical analysis (Chapter 7. Profitability of Technical Trading Rules in an Emerging Market) or parallel trading (Chapter 2. Informed Trading in Parallel Auction and Dealer Markets: The Case of the London Stock Exchange).Read More »Book Review: “The Handbook of Trading Strategies for Navigating and Profiting from Currency, Bond, and Stock Markets”

A DVD Review – “Harnessing Explosive Market Turns: Finding Profitable Set-ups with Fibonacci, Lucas, Elliott Wave, and Candlesticks” by Jeff Greenblatt

I am already a veteran reviewer of Jeff Greenblatt’s opera magna, since I already did a review for his well known book “Breakthrough Strategies for Predicting Any Market” :). In the beginning, I must admit I was a bit confused by the cryptic language and by the unorthodox approaches used by Jeff in that book. But since then I read a few other books on trading and the light started to shine at the end of this tunnel. So here I am, with a new review on Greenblatt’s latest DVD trading series of videos, “Harnessing Explosive Market Turns”.Read More »A DVD Review – “Harnessing Explosive Market Turns: Finding Profitable Set-ups with Fibonacci, Lucas, Elliott Wave, and Candlesticks” by Jeff Greenblatt