Description A RINGSIDE SEAT ON SOME OF THE BIGGEST DEALS AND BIGGEST PERSONALITIES IN BUSINESS AND GLOBAL POLITICS. FTSE is an account of how a small start-up created by the Financial Times and the London Stock Exchange launched in the mid 1980s to provide financial information, became a world leader and one of the UK's most trusted and famous brands. It chronicles how the FTSE 100 was born and details the ferocious dealmaking that followed over 35 years of market boom and bust. It provides a ringside seat on some of the biggest deals and biggest personalities in business and global politics. There have been behind-the-scenes rows with chief executives of some of the world's largest companies, political in-fighting, diplomatic incidents, and even controversy over a pioneering push into responsible investing that began life as a conversation with James Bond actor Roger Moore. FTSE is a modern British brand recognised the world over, like the Royal Family, the BBC or Sir Richard Branson's Virgin empire. They are just four letters on an electronic ticker tape, but FTSE has become a byword for money, power, influence and - crucially after numerous financial crises - trust. How this organisation, FTSE International, brought order to the financial system over several decades is a story of how capitalism globalised and a data revolution transformed the investment industry. It is a story of how a team of British innovators seized an opportunity to build a business that today leads its field and guides the fortunes of an astonishing $16 trillion of funds. It is a story that Mark Makepeace, as the founding Chief Executive of FTSE International, knows better than anybody.

Studies on Samp;P 500 Index changes are unable to reject index compiler certification in explaining permanent stock price effects to index additions. The FTSE 100 Index comprises one hundred stocks ranked highest by market capitalization, and therefore precludes certification. FTSE 100 Index additions elicit a permanent positive stock price effect, whilst deletions reveal a rebound following announcement period losses. Both price effects can be explained by changes in earnings expectations, information production, and investor awareness. These results challenge belief that index changes (absent certification) are information-free events and long-run demand curves for stocks slope downward.

LONDON, LATE 1990s. Frankie Cavanagh has just started working as a trader and is determined to beat the men she works with at their own game. The dizzying surge of adrenaline that comes with the chaos, the speed, the rush of the day, is only amplified when she begins an affair with her charismatic American boss. Powered by clubs, cocktails, and cocaine, their thrill-seeking relationship quickly spirals out of control, bringing Frankie to a point of reckoning. This electrifying novel from the “awe-inspiring” (Birmingham Post, UK), award-winning author of The Killing Jar lays bare the landscape of London’s trading room floor—its fierce customs, furious pace, and insatiable greed. Nicola Monaghan depicts the high-stakes reality of the burgeoning global economy in the 1990s and reinvents the classic tale of ambition and power with a gritty, fearless heroine. Crackling with energy and intensity, Monaghan’s powerful and seductive prose plunges readers into a whirlpool of hubris and betrayal, capturing the fragile nature of morality and confirming her reputation as an exhilarating young talent.

Have you ever wondered how the top City traders make big profits from share trading? Do you know why the best investors know exactly when the market is going to rise or fall? And do you wish you could do the same? By following 20 hard and fast rules,Trading Secrets shows you how you can make the same high returns as experienced investors and traders. Using historical, economic and technical trend analysis from the last fifty years, it identifies the ways for you to capitalise on such events as the clocks going back or moving forward, religious holidays, major sporting events and even the US presidential election. Written for both experienced investors and also those with little knowledge of the stock market, Simon Thompson’s practical investing guide offers trading strategies that you can use over the short-term or the long-term. For instance, do you know how daylight changes affect how the stock market performs and, more importantly, how to make big gains by trading on this knowledge? Or do you know which sector has massively outperformed the market in the first quarter of the year – posting a quarterly return of 12 per cent – in all bar four years in the past three decades? Trading Secrets uncovers all and more importantly explains why these trends occur, so that you can be confident your investments will pay off, even when the market is falling.

Paul Mumford is a noted stock-picker with over 50 years’ experience in the markets - first as a stock broker and then as a star fund manager. In The Stock Picker, Mumford takes a deeply personal look back at his time investing: exploring not only the secrets of his successful approach to the markets and how to find great shares but reminiscing about the changes that have taken place in the investing world since the early 1960s. This book is not an investing how-to: instead it is a financial history straight from the horse’s mouth. While there is much for investors to learn from, it is an also evocative window into a vanished City of stock jobbers, messenger boys, luncheon vouchers and ledger-keepers - not to mention financial crises, booms and busts, and the life and death of companies great and small. Mumford also covers how his own personal life has influenced his stock-picking approach: from running his own bookmaking business as a schoolboy to an ill-fated attempt at oil painting at night school (not to mention the vibrant music scene of the late 1950s). The Stock Picker is a charming and readable autobiography that pulls no punches - ideal for any investor interested in what has made a leading fund manager tick, or who simply wants to spend some time nostalgically looking back at how the investing and wider world has changed over the years.

"Brilliantly written...a joy to read...Bleeding Edge is totally gonzo, totally wonderful. It really is good to have Thomas Pynchon around, doing what he does best." - Michael Dirda, The Washington Post "Exemplary...dazzling and ludicrous." - Jonathan Lethem, The New York Times Book Review It is 2001 in New York City, in the lull between the collapse of the dot-com boom and the terrible events of September 11th. Maxine Tarnow runs a fine little fraud investigation business on the Upper West Side. All is ticking over nice and normal, until she starts looking into the finances of a computer-security firm and its billionaire geek CEO. She soon finds herself mixed up with a drug runner in an art deco motorboat, a professional nose obsessed with Hitler’s aftershave, a neoliberal enforcer with footwear issues, and an array of bloggers, hackers, code monkeys, and entrepreneurs, some of whom begin to show up mysteriously dead. Foul play, of course. Will perpetrators be revealed, forget about brought to justice? Will Maxine have to take the handgun out of her purse? Will Jerry Seinfeld make an unscheduled guest appearance? Will accounts secular and karmic be brought into balance? Hey. Who wants to know?

Nowhere in Europe are people more likely to enjoy a regular flutter in stocks and shares than in Britain. Whether we consider the millions of online stockbroking accounts or the billions spent on spread betting - it is a national pastime in today's Britain to play the markets. How did this distinctively British obsession with investment and speculation come about? Playing the Market tells this story by exploring the history of financial capitalism in Britain during the twentieth century from below. It explains how and why everyday British people increasingly invested, speculated, and gambled in stocks and shares from the outbreak of World War I, over the postwar decades and the Thatcher years, up until the premiership of Tony Blair. The study accounts for a momentous shift in attitudes towards stock market investment that occurred throughout the twentieth century. In the interwar period, traditional moral and cultural constraints about the stock market, which were still powerful in the Victorian period, gradually began to collapse in public and private life. In the following decades, financial securities lost their stigma of being either immoral or suitable only for the upper classes. Promising higher than average returns and a similar thrill of risk and reward as gambling in horses or the football pools, the stock market became a popular pastime for millions of Britons - even in the postwar decades, when Britain had nationalized industries and politicians of both parties indulged in staunchly anti-finance rhetoric. With the expansion of popular investment after both world wars, Britain developed a stock market culture that was unique across Europe and gave rise to a market populist sentiment that eventually proved fertile soil for the arrival of Thatcherism.