By James Kynge
This is one of the best two short books on China (the other is Mark Elvin's 1973 book "Pattern of the Chinese Past") that I know of. Kynge, the former China bureau chief for the Financial Times, captures the amazing contradictions of a Chinese economy that is simultaneously the most nakedly capitalist on our planet and a top-down command bureaucracy that generations of Chinese emperors and Confucian officials would recognize. A favorite chapter is one in which Kynge's debunks the myth that China must rise to economic No. 1 because it was No. 1 in the past. (This chapter is fascinating reading when combined with Elvin's attempt to explain why China, once the most innovative society in the world, stagnated while Western Europe caught up in technology and then surpassed it.)
By Antoine van Agtmael
Van Agtmael's thesis is extremely simple: In a global economy, the developed economies of the U.S., Japan and Europe don't have a monopoly on world-class, market-dominating, superprofitable companies. Because developed-world investors are biased toward investing in their home markets, many of the stocks of these new global blue chips are undervalued in comparison with such developed-world peers as McDonald's (MCD, news, msgs) or PepsiCo (PEP, news, msgs). Most of the book is taken up with short portraits of 25 of these new global blue chips, including Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (TSM, news, msgs) to steel-pipe maker Tenaris (TS, news, msgs). The profiles are invaluable to any investor trying to get comfortable with expanding a portfolio beyond the U.S. because it can be tough for U.S. investors to get even basic information on overseas companies. Van Agtmael, an experienced portfolio manager, keeps the portraits balanced and offers thumbnail rundowns of each company's pluses and minuses from an investor's point of view.
By David Hackett Fischer
Fischer, a Pulitzer Prize-winning history professor at Brandeis University, lays out the case for long periods of steadily increasing prices interrupted by briefer periods of price equilibrium in his 1996 book, "The Great Wave." What's fascinating to me about Fischer's price waves, which are very different and much more convincing than the long-cycle theories of folks like Pretcher or Kondratieff, is how much they explain about our current economy.
By Yale and Jeffrey Hirsch
I think now (Aug. 31, 2004) is a good time to both buy a biotech and to put together a new version of that biotechnology watch list. Why? First, seasonality. We're entering the strongest period of the year for biotech stocks. Who says? Yale and Jeffrey Hirsch reach that conclusion in the Stock Trader's Almanac.
By Satyajit Das
You'll end this book thinking that you understand the world of financial derivatives -- which will put you on a par with those on Wall Street who built the synthetic assets that big investors now use to pass risk and reward around the world. Das has the distinct advantage of having worked for the big banks and investment houses, such as Citigroup and Merrill Lynch, that sell derivatives to clients. That means he knows both what promises the inventors and marketers of derivatives had made and how those promises played out in reality. That makes this, at times, a strikingly funny book. Managing derivatives sometimes reminds me of herding cats: You can tell them where you want them to go, but the little critters hardly ever listen. It's hard to get your mind around what derivatives are and how they work, but making the effort is critical to your ability to navigate the financial markets. With a current face value of derivatives of something like $345 trillion, derivatives play a role in price movements in any financial market you can name.
By Matthew Simmons
According to Simmons, the more water you pump into a field, the less oil you can pump out. This is especially true, he writes, when water has been pumped in rapidly in an effort to get more oil out fast. Eventually, the field has to be abandoned with much of the oil still in the ground. This, Simmons claims, is exactly what happened in several huge Saudi fields to push depletion rates up to a point where all the extra production will do no more than balance the shortfall from existing fields. Saudi Arabia, he concludes, may have already reached peak sustainable production.