The New Reality of Wall Street

July 1, 2003
According to Coxe, "Wall Street is not a seething den of corruption but isn't a safe place for the unwary either." Coxe, chair and chief strategist at Harris Management, Inc., and manager of the Harris Insight Equity Fund, explains that triple waterfall is a term used by technical analysts to describe the chart pattern of a specific boom/bust event that takes decades to run its course. Throughout, he examines various triple-waterfall events while giving us an in-depth view of Wall Street. Coxe concludes that the biggest investment challenge in the next decade will result from crises in the exchange rate of the dollar; as he himself declares, this is not a book about investing but about protecting oneself when the country's currency gets into trouble. Coxe has a flair for analyzing markets, and readers will agree with many of his salient points, especially when he shows that while stockholders lost heavily in the past few years, "the men in control made fortunes that had in previous capitalist eras gone only to those who built great companies that were the foundations of America's rise to international leadership." Not for the average investor but nevertheless recommended for public libraries with strong investment interest.-Bellinda Wise, Nassau Community Coll. Lib., Garden City, NY

Copyright 2003 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

July 1, 2003
Coxe describes the spectacular rise and fall of technology and telecom stocks as a "Triple Waterfall," a technical analyst's term for a classic boom-and-bust event. In events like these, vast amounts of wealth change hands from investors to those who profit from the bubble, in this case the upper management of dot-coms and the like who cashed in big at the top by selling stock and exercising stock options. According to Coxe, "Triple Waterfalls aren't mere bubbles, they are financial pandemics that take not months, not years, but decades to run their course." His analyses place investors in the 10- to 12-year "final long-term collapse phase," a treacherous climate most today have never experienced, so few have a clue as how to survive, much less profit in these times. After a reasonable discussion of economic theory, Coxe lays out an investment survival strategy for this environment that includes a consistent approach of diversification and maintenance of an acceptable, if not spectacular, rate of return.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2003, American Library Association.)