| | |  | Retail Security | Home » » The WSJ Guide to the 50 Economic Indicators That Really Matter: From Big Macs to "Zombie Banks," the Indicators Smart Investors Watch to Beat the Market (The Wall Street Journal) | | | | | | | Description: | | An entertaining, must-have guide to the indicators most investors aren't following—but should be! To make the best possible investment decisions, savvy investors know that they should pay close attention to economic indicators. But while most are looking at conventional barometers like unemployment rates and housing starts, the smartest investors are following the often ignored, sometimes curious, but always interesting indicators that offer a true sense of where the economy is and where it's going. They provide the vital information needed to beat the market. In The Wall Street Journal Guide to the 50 Economic Indicators That Really Matter, Simon Constable and Robert E. Wright offer investors powerful new tools to guide them through the markets. Whether it's the VIX index (which tracks the level of anxiety among investors) or the Vixen index (which tracks the number of attractive waitresses in your hometown), this essential guide includes in-depth analyses of 50 valuable economic indicators, as well as what to watch for, what to do when movement happens, and the risk level involved in taking action. This must-have guide entertains and enlightens while offering essential advice on navigating the global economic climate. | | | Product Details: | | | Author:
| Simon Constable | | Paperback:
| 304 pages | | Publisher:
| HarperBusiness | | Publication Date:
| May 03, 2011 | | Language:
| English | | ISBN:
| 0062001388 | | Product Length:
| 8.02 inches | | Product Width:
| 5.31 inches | | Product Height:
| 0.74 inches | | Product Weight:
| 0.51 pounds | | Package Length:
| 7.9 inches | | Package Width:
| 5.3 inches | | Package Height:
| 0.9 inches | | Package Weight:
| 0.5 pounds | | Average Customer Rating:
|  based on 15 reviews |
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| | | | Customer Reviews: | |
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38 of 38 found the following review helpful:
Witty tour of key (and not so key) economic indicatorsMay 12, 2011
By Hal Jordan
You know you are dealing with a book that's overstating its value just a tad when you see this in the introduction: "... we'll show you how the indicators we've chosen can help you see the turns in the economy before they happen. With that prescience you can make changes to your investments ahead of time and avoid the suffering you probably felt during the past couple of years." Now anyone who could actually predict the "turns in the economy" using these indicators -- or any others -- would be reclining on his yacht moored off the south of France, and would be unlikely to divulge his secrets in a mass market paperback. That said, this book is an entertaining read and can serve as a useful reference to anyone who follows the markets or the broader economy.
Simon Constable writes for the Wall Street Journal and hosts their afternoon "NewsHub" recap of the markets. Anyone who follows the NewHub will be familiar with his witty -- actually, kind of snarky -- commentary. He's sort of the Simon Cowell of the Wall Street crowd. His distinctive voice is evident in this book. His co-author, Robert Wright, has written extensively on business history and used to be associated with the Stern School at NYU and the Museum of Financial History in Manhattan's financial district, although he apparently now teaches at a college in South Dakota.
The book consists of 50 short chapters devoted to the indicators. Each chapter has a brief description of the indicator -- usually accompanied by a quote from an investment analysts on the indicator's importance -- a time series graph of the indicator, and a discussion of possible investment opportunities that might occur when the indicator is unusually high or low. Each chapter ends with an "Executive Summary" box that explains when data on the indicator are released, where to go to find the data, what to watch for, and so on. To anyone who follows the financial news even casually, many of the indicators will be familiar, such as automobile sales, durable goods orders, or M2. To most people, though, other indicators are likely to be less familiar, such as book-to-bill ratio, the Baltic dry index, and the Tankan survey. I'm a little skeptical about how useful some of the more obscure indicators will be to the average investor, but they make for interesting reading. The final (tongue-in-cheek) indicator, the "Vixen index," measures how attractive the waitresses are in your local restaurant. The more attractive the waitresses, the worse the labor market, because in a strong labor market these attractive women would be working at better jobs elsewhere.
All-in-all, leaving aside the somewhat overstated claims the authors make for investment strategies based on these indicators, this is a valuable little reference tool and should be, at the very least, a fun read for most personal investors.
19 of 19 found the following review helpful:
Wish I had this book 4 years agoMay 16, 2011
By Adsteelie
I came to finance more than 4 years ago and had to teach myself the basic from the ground up. After reading this book, I wish I would have had it back then because my life would have been 10 times easier. You get the economics and finance basics explained in a concise easy-to-understand way. And as an added bonus you get the invest-able angle and where to go for more information. I now keep this book with me at all times as a quick reference guide when need be. Anyone who wants to understand finance must buy this book.
16 of 17 found the following review helpful:
 Excellent little handbookMay 29, 2011
By B. Arends
Someone should have written this years ago. Economist Robert Wright and my Wall Street Journal colleague Simon Constable have written a fun, readable, and extremely useful primer to the economic tea-leaves. It will help anyone - from a high school student to a hedge fund manager - make sense of the latest economic news. Every day, it seems, Wall Street is either lurching downwards in a new panic because, say, the TED Spread has widened (boo!) or is jumping 200 points because the Baltic Dry index has picked up (hooray!). If you see this stuff on CNBC - while sitting in a bar waiting for someone, or while working out a a gym - you may wonder what on earth it all means. (You're not alone. One of the dirty secrets of Wall Street is hardly anybody really knows what's going on.) This book is a great introduction.
29 of 36 found the following review helpful:
 Worse Than UselessAug 24, 2011
By Stephen Donovan
Here's a little book you should never have bought. If you bought it throw it away. Your first indication that you bought garbage is at page xiv of the Introduction where you are told that some of the "big indicators" such as the CPI are excluded from the book. So important indicators are entirely left out. Then read chapter one which discusses the "Automobile Sales" indicator. There on page 4 you will find a nice bar graph of "New Vehicle Sales and Leases" which although this book was published in 2011 displays information only for 1990-2008. If you then go to both sources given on page 6 of the same chapter one to find what the data for this indicator has been for the last two and one half years you will find nothing; the cite to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics website takes you to a long pdf document which has many tables of data, but no graphs of any type and nothing called "New Vehicle Sales and Leases". The other cite to a Wall Street Journal web page (and the two authors are always pushing WSJ services) has some interesting graphs but again noting called "New Vehicle Sales and Leases" and nothing that looks remotely like that bar graph in chapter one or that has that same chapter one bar graph information. A search on that WSJ web site for "New Vehicle Sales and Leases" leads only to a lot of car sales ads. So here you have book that tells you there are a number (i.e. 50) of important economic indicators but important indicators are left out, the data is already two an one half years old, and if you want to find the indicators set forth so that you can follow them or track them yourself you cannot do so, because the indicators cannot be found where the authors say you can find them. So I stopped reading it and threw the book away. A waste of money.
5 of 5 found the following review helpful:
Great book for anyone interested in markets and investingSep 11, 2011
By Courtney
I picked up this book several weeks ago, and I could not put it down. I'm an amateur investor, and this is a great book for anyone who wants a user-friendly way to understand markets and investing. It's a book I know I'll come back to frequently.
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