Books : Business, Finance & Law : Professional Finance

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Books : Business, Finance & Law : Professional Finance

• The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life

  Alice Schroeder

  
  
   

• Exploring Corporate Strategy: Text and Cases

  Gerry Johnson, Kevan Scholes, Richard Whittington

  
  
   

• Management and Organisational Behaviour

  Laurie J. Mullins

  
  
   

• When Markets Collide: Investment Strategies for the Age of Global Economic Change

  Mohamed El-Erian

  
  
   

• Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets

  Nassim Nicholas Taleb

  
  
   

• The Essays of Warren Buffett: Lessons for Investors and Managers, Revised Edition

  L. A. Cunningham

  
  
   

• The New Paradigm for Financial Markets: The Credit Crisis of 2008 and What It Means

  George Soros

  
  
   

• The Intelligent Investor

  Benjamin Graham

  
  
   

• The Naked Trader: How Anyone Can Make Money Trading Shares

  Robbie Burns

  
  
   

• Management and Cost Accounting

  Colin Drury

  
  
   

• Brilliant Project Management: What the Best Project Managers Know, Say and Do

  Stephen Barker, Rob Cole

  
  
   

• Arnold Corporate Financial Management

  Glen Arnold

  
  
   

• Screw it, Let's Do it: Lessons in Life (Quick Reads)

  Sir Richard Branson

  
  
   

• Accounting for Non-Accounting Students

  John R. Dyson

  
  
   

• Taxation: Finance Act 2008

  Alan Melville

  
  
   

• Principles of Corporate Finance with S&P bind-in card

  Richard A Brealey, Stewart C Myers, Franklin Allen

  
  
   

• When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long Term Capital Management

  Roger Lowenstein

  
  On September 23, 1998, the boardroom of the New York Fed was a tense place. Around the table sat the heads of every major Wall Street bank, the chairman of the New York Stock Exchange, and representatives from numerous European banks, each of whom had been summoned by the Fed to discuss the highly unusual prospect of rescuing what had, until then, been the envy of them all, the extraordinarily successful bond-trading firm of Long-Term Capital Management. Roger Lowenstein's When Genius Failed is the gripping story behind the Fed's unprecedented move, the incredible heights reached by LTCM, and its eventual dramatic demise.

  Lowenstein, a financial journalist and author of Buffet: The Making of an American Capitalist, uncovers and examines the personalities, academic expertise, professional relationships, and layers of numbers behind LTCM's roller-coaster ride with the precision and knowledge of a skilled surgeon. The fund's enigmatic founder, John Meriwether, spent almost 20 years at Salomon Brothers, where he formed its renowned Arbitrage Group by hiring academia's top financial economists. Though Meriwether left Salomon under a cloud of the SEC's wrath, he leapt into his next venture with ease, and enticed most of his former Salomon hires--and eventually even David Mullins, the former vice-chairman of the US Federal Reserve--to join him in starting a hedge fund that would beat all hedge funds.

  LTCM began trading in February 1994, after completing a road show that, despite the Ph.D.-touting partners' lack of social skills and their disdainful condescension of potential investors who couldn't rise to their intellectual level, netted a whopping 1.25 billion dollars. The fund would seek to earn a tiny spread on thousands of trades, "as if it were vacuuming nickels that others couldn't see," in the words of one of its Nobel laureate partners, Myron Scholes. And nickels it found. In its first two years, LTCM earned 1.6 billion dollars, profits that exceeded forty percent even after the partners' hefty cuts. By the spring of 1996 it was holding $140 billion in assets. But the end was soon in sight, and Lowenstein's detailed account of each successively worse month of 1998, culminating in a disastrous August and the partners' subsequent panicked moves, is riveting.

  The arbitrageur's world is a complicated one, and it might have served Lowenstein well to slow down at the start and explain in greater detail the complex terms of the more exotic species of investment flora that cram the book's pages. However, much of the intrigue of the Long-Term story lies in its dizzying pace (not to mention the dizzying amounts of money won and lost in the fund's short lifespan), and Lowenstein's smooth, conversational, but equally urgent tone carries it along well. The book is a compelling read for those who've always wondered what lay behind the Fed's controversial involvement with the LTCM hedge-fund debacle. --S. Ketchum

  
   

• Operations Management

  Nigel Slack, Stuart Chambers, Robert Johnston

  
  
   

• Consumer Behaviour: A European Perspective

  Michael R. Solomon, Gary Bamossy, Soren Askegaard, Margaret K. Hogg

  
  
   

• Essentials of Marketing

  Dr. Frances Brassington, Stephen Pettitt