David Charters (1)

In his introduction, Charters writes: “Please do not feel sorry for the characters who come to grief. Like gamblers in a casino, they know the risks and make their own decisions – and they do not complain when they win” (p. 7). I took this to mean that bad things would probably be happening to at least a few likeable characters. As it turned out, bad things happened to many characters in these stories. They lost their jobs, went broke, were left by their wives, failed a job interview. One even committed suicide. For the most part, I barely felt a twinge for any of them.

While there were a few main characters who were likeable, or who at least weren't jerks within the small number of pages they were given in the book, they were outnumbered by the unlikeable main characters. Those characters were corporate sharks (or, in at least one instance, wannabe corporate sharks) who cheerfully plowed through their colleagues to get to the top. They were philanderers who saw the women around them as either beddable, useful around the office or home, or not worth having having around. Quite a few of them drank at work, or after work, or the night before a big business deal. In other, longer works they could potentially have been multifaceted, sympathetic characters, but in The Insiders they were just jerks. Most of them weren't even interesting jerks.

What kept me reading was not the characters, but rather the situations they found themselves in and my desire to know what twist Chambers would throw at readers next. It also didn't hurt that each story was short and easy to get through.

Quite a few of the stories dealt with business situations: deals that went well or badly, team-building exercises, scrambles to get or keep jobs, etc. A few stories delved into the personal lives of some of the characters – in one rather funny instance, a supposed business situation was revealed to be a bit of bedroom roleplaying (somehow, I don't see that relationship lasting very long). For the most part the characters in this book were heterosexual men, but a very small number of stories did bring up homosexuality and/or feature women as more prominent characters.

Overall, this was an okay book. The characters tended to blend together, but the twists I knew each story would end with kept me reading. Possibly because of the existence of real-life people like Bernie Madoff, it didn't really bother me that so many of the characters were liars and jerks, and I actually kind of appreciated that things often didn't work out well for them.

(Original review, with read-alikes and watch-alikes, posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.)… (mer)

You cannot argue with a good trading record and when I met him in 1999, David Charters had been charting for more than twenty-five years. His book is as perfect as a step-by-step guide can be, written with clarity and wit by a master of the trade. It also includes a quiz, and 'A day in the life of a technical analyst' in which, curiously, Charters reveals he was still plotting by hand in 1998. Unfortunately Charters on Charting is out of print, but you can pick up a second-hand copy on the internet. Otherwise Technical Analysis of the Financial Markets is worth buying, I am told, in fact Charters suggests it as further reading.… (mer)