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CNBC's Ron Insana is one of the founding fathers of TV biz-news punditry, and his analytical strength and fondness for puns do not desert him in The Message of the Markets, the followup to his book Traders' Tales: A Chronicle of Wall Street Myths, Legends, and Outright Lies. But despite his trademark perky tone (the section on the Gulf War is titled, "Oil's Well That Ends Well"), Insana writes to fulfill an extremely serious ambition: he wants you to learn to use the fluctuations of the financial markets to actually predict the future. He's not kidding. Insana insists that the market leaves coded messages, "breadcrumbs on the road to the gingerbread house." With a few charts and a bit of technical explanation, he shows how you could have profited in the Great Salad Oil Swindle of 1963, the crash of 1987, the Asian crisis of 1997, and other riveting fiscal dramas. Insana makes his points convincingly. There's his anecdote about President Kennedy's assassination, when the market began to tank before the news got out. One broker sparked the selloff, saying it "had something to do with the president." The possibly apocryphal explanation: Disappointed dealers at a Dallas brokerage house go back to their office when JFK's parade is halted without explanation. Though nobody suspects the truth, their manager can think of no bullish reasons such a parade would be cancelled, only bearish ones, so he sells early and saves big. While this story remains unverified, Insana has plenty of verified market-message examples: the 1990 oil spike that heralded Saddam Hussein's Kuwait invasion two months early, the Thai baht crisis that presaged the turning of Asia's tigers into whipped kittens, and the 1993 Dow Jones Utility Average warning preceding the 1994 bond crash. A notable anecdote: one trader deduced a 1980s spat on the border of Egypt and Libya based strictly on upticks in U.S. based oil companies and defense stocks and dips in two international oil stocks and a designer-jeans company dependent on Egyptian cotton. Can you really predict Greenspan by reading Insana's book? Or is it all just Monday morning quarterbacking? Hard to say. But Insana's book is as fun as the investment game itself. --Tim Appelo END
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