Gee, Think.

I just found OptionInvestor.com this morning using stumbler (a excellent firefox plugin). They offer a free report on an options strategy. Their 5 page document discusses the bull put spread in terms of risk / reward, return on investment, and position management. This is a great place for a budding options trader to get started. Of course you have to trade your email address to get their report, but what else is new? Since you have to give them your email address anyway, you might as well try the free newsletter that they offer. I just signed up today. I haven’t read it yet, but I’m always interested in new content in my search for options exptertise. I think that the free report and the free ezine are the bait for their fee based subscription services, but you can’t blame them for that. If you also decide to sign up, let me know what you think.

Sun Tzu Was a Sissy

Conquer Your Enemies, Promote Your Friends, and Wage the Real Art of War

Stanley Bing

ISBN 13: 978-0-06-073478-7

ISBN 10: 0-06073478-7

Bing writes for a real laugh at office politics. He uses classic business ‘art’ to describe things such as “some of the various weapons at your disposal in the average corporate situation, and their respective utilities in warlike corporate situations in which you may routinely find yourself” The image he uses to compare these “weapons” is a fairly bland looking bar graph. The graph is the kind that, if you’re in business, I’m sure you’ve seen many times before. That’s what makes the whole thing funny. It’s a kind of sick satire on the savage nature of business and politics.

 

He’s talking about deciet, sabotage, and systematic aggression as if he was talking about the fine points of a merger or acquisition. It’s quietly hilarious. He discusses the methods for undermining a coworker and graphs the effectiveness over time. It’s hilarious to imagine a meeting between professionals in which they discuss how to effectively attack other businesses, or divisions within their own business, and use charts to explain their opinions of the best method.

 

The sad part of this satire is that Bing’s probably right. There is a lot of infighting, betrayal, sabotaging that happens between people of the same company. Luckily I haven’t come up against this in my career yet. I do feel that If i do I will now be better prepared to handle the situation having read Bing’s book.

A Whole New Mind

Why Right Brainers Will Rule the Future

Daniel H. Pink

ISBN 1-59448-171-7

I love this book. I am a programmer. I work in the financial district of New York City’s Manhattan. I’m constantly flexing my left brain muscle with “L-Directed” thinking. Pink’s book has some real meaning for a guy like me.

In the first part of “A Whole New Mind” Pink discusses three big topics: Abundance, Asia, and Automation. Yea yea yea… Haven’t we all read that in “The World Is Flat” by Thomas Friedman? I read Friedman’s book before I got to Pink’s. I can’t say who inspired who or if the books were conceived independently but I can say that the first couple chapter’s in Pink’s ‘Conceptual Age’ felt like a compressed Friedman. Actually that’s a good thing because not everyone wants to pick up Friedman’s 600 page tome. Pink does a good job of getting the facts and the story of global change across. These first 50 pages are essential to someone looking to learn more about globalization and its potential affect on individuals.

Pink’s Part Two, ‘The Six Senses”, is awesome! As a technical professional I feel a yearning to flex my right brain muscle. I love music & art, but I just don’t make time to enjoy it. I’m not going to guess at the reasons for that, but Pink encourages a guy like me to take the time to learn more about the arts that I love. It’s encouraging to feel like creating or enjoying art is “productive”. Pink discusses the numerous benefits of arts in our lives and even the necessity of becoming more well rounded people. His “Whole New Mind” is a mind that uses both its left and right hemispheres. A whole mind is a mind that exercises analysis and creativity regularly. It’s a mind where logic and empathy coexist.

So far I’ve only read through the ‘Design’ and ‘Story’ Chapters of the book’s second part, ‘The Six Senses’ but I already feel inspired. Yesterday I made a quick still life sketch at work and I’m planning to visit some of the design museums that he mentioned soon.

I highly recommend this book!

I’ve just finished the last chapter of “The World Is Flat”! What a
great read! This last chapter stirred up a lot of emotion inside me.
Friedman discussed the potential for destruction and for progress. It
was a pithy combination of ups and downs that nearly brought tears to my
eyes as I thought about it on my walk to work.
I give this book my highest recommmendation to anyone that enjoys
narrative essay books. It’s a long one, but Friedman’s anecdotes and
insights make it worth your time.

I’m now at around page 175 in Friedman’s flat world and I’mstill pretty
excited about it. His description of the potential for small businesses
to globalize really has me thinking. What are my skils? What can I
produce and manufacture? How can I market my services to customers
around the globe?
Currently I’m reading about UPS and how they do so much more than we
know for businesses. Friedman says that they can help a small player
act like a big one through shipping services and much much more.
Aparently UPS is a logistics servicwe, and can take over most business
functions once you’ve figured out what your business model is.

I’ve read several books lately and the combination of their indeas gives
me a mindset focused on preparedness and individuality. “Conquer the
Crash” by Robert Pretcher warned me about the significant stock market
crash. I just finished that book last week, and it looks like the
downtrend which will sap 15% of the Nasdaq’s value by February will
start this week! If only I had started paying attention to his writings
last winter!
“The |orld is Flat” by Thomas Friedman has inspired me to think about
the global pool of competition for jobs and opportunities. His writing
both inspires me to continue with my blogging and independent
entreprenuership and to think about my opportunites in a global sense.
Is it possible that I could network with people across the globe?
I’ve become a readaholic lately, and I’m loving every minute of it.

I love this book!!
It is really inspiring. Friedman’s outlook seems very optimistic and
positive so far. I am on page 118, about a fifth of the way through.
He’s been talking heavily about the internet as a powerful flattening
force. He mentions numerous instances where inidviduals are able to
collaborate and succeed using the new tools from today’s technology.
As a computer scientist, I already knew a lot of the content in these
first 120 pages. But even for me, someone who has watched the internet
grow and change since the early days of Netscape, friedman still added a
lot of insight, interviews, and valuable commentary.
The general feeling of this book is inspring. Friedman continually
enumerates the great potential for people of our times to use their
creativity to choose their own adventure. I look forward to reading his
book on my daily commutes.

Okay, I have to admit it. I am convinced that Pretcher’s perspective
(along with the Elliot Wave International Team) on the wave theory is
right on. Today, a friend asked we why I thought that the market
couldn’t stay up after gapping up. He started talking about various
news items, and I had to say that I don’t think it has anything to do
with news. I’ve been converted to thinking that it is this robust
fractal driving the markets.

Sociotimes.com is mentioned in the Elliot Wave Financial Forecast that
I’ve been reading over the past several days.
From my quick perusal I think that this website is focused on
interpreting the social implications of events. I think the
interpretations there are based on the theory that the stock markets are
barometers of aggregate social mood of the world’s population.
In the “Elliot Wave Principle” by Frost and Pretcher the theory that the
stock markets is a measurement of “man’s progress” is discussed. The
five and three wave pattern of the wave theory is likened to a natural
law that emerges from a wide variety of observations. The tenet that
nature follows the path of least reisistance bolsters the 5-3 numbers
since any lesser numbers would not allow for both progress and
alternation.
So the financial markets are seen as indicators of the social mood of
the world through the elliot wave theory. This sociotimes.com site
interprets events to see what they could indicate about social mood. It
seems like they are looking for correlations between public sentiment
and what the market is showing about our mood. Very intriguing.

I’ve been reading more of John Murphy’s “Intermarket Analysis” book
lately. He has a couple chapters that discuss various business cycle
theorys and what they mean for the financial markets. As I understand
it, the idealized behavior is this:
1. Bond prices rise
2. Stock prices rise
3. Commodity prices rise
4. Bond prices fall
5. Stock prices fall
6. Commodity prices fall
Steps 1, 2, and 3 are part of an economic expansion. Steps 4, 5, and 6
are part of an economic contraction. The expansion is positive growth
and the contraction is negative growth. The time between steps 3 and 4
is when the economic growth actually turns negative, but it is decling
from the middle of step two to the midlle of step 5.
So, having read this theory on the business cycle and it’s relation to
financial markets, I’m going to try and plot our position in the steps.
Everyone who’s paying attention to the stock markets can see that we’ve
just experienced a major downturn. We also know that commodity prices
were soaring during this downturn. The commodities were corrected as
well if I remember correctly but I think they are still heading up.
This last week was a great week for the Dow, Naz, and S&P, but are
stocks done falling?
I think bond prices have been falling because yields have been
increasing. I think this means we are somewhere around step 4, which
would nake this an early recession. If that’s true we should see stocks
and bonds continue to fall over the next months. Commodities should
join the fall eventually as well.