Tuesday, August 28, 2007
W.Boudville abandons medicine...
...and enters a new field -- financial engineering. His incisive review of the book Credit Derivative Strategies: New Thinking on Managing Risk and Return, edited by Rohan Douglas, from Bloomberg Press, published very recently: on July 31, 2007 (as the books that W.Boudville reviews tend to be, at least those he gives a high evaluation) sets a new standard of... er... uhm.... something.
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9 comments:
What did he say???? That review was an painful on my eyes as the worst of a Klausner review.
For what audience is Boudville writing these reviews? His medical reviews are laughable, as any one who has ever even taken their dog to the vet can tell you. His reviews on books dealing with information technology have been commented on by many people whose comments exhibit quite clearly the fact that Boudville knows not of what he speaks. And now he's exhibiting what we are to surmise is his financial expertise. But for what audience? Here is one of Boudville's sentence fragments from this review:
"Slicing a base collection of revenue streams into various tranches of differing expected yields and riskiness."
Now if you were new to this subject Boudville's use of the word tranche, which he uses again later in this review, would undoubtedly puzzle you. But if you were conversant with this subject matter then the review is too simplistic. Boudville is writing for a non-existent audience. (By the way, a tranche is one of a set of multiple-class securities, like collaterized mortgage obligations. Since Boudville was trying to dazzle people with his technical vocabulary I thought it only fair to offer a definition.)
W.Boudville, I suspect, doesn't write for an audience. He probably writes in order to have posted these reviews; their further fate is of no interest to him. He's gotta be in some way compensated for posting positive reviews on newly published books by the books' publishers.
Now, why these publishers believe the boudville drivel will be useful I don't know. But then most of suspicious reviews (the majority these days?) aren't well written -- W.Boudville is no better, no worse than the rest of the shills. Perhaps it works anyway (as long as a book page comes up with a five-star rating, regardless of the reviews themselves). Or maybe it's something else.
Yes, of course, the awswer is obviously that they're not being written for an audience but for another reason. We know in some cases the reviewers very boldly, or stupidly as the case may be, sell the same books they review right at the Amazon site,(Mark-O, Gunny).
It would be conceivable that a portion of these top reviewers could be selling these books and additional materials through venues other than Amazon. The technical and medical volumes Boudville reviews are some very expensive items. It could be a lucrative business if he is reselling these costly items.
Who knows... I do think they are paid in some way. Selling a few books doesn't bring much money, even if they're expensive. I sold books on eBay a while ago for a while: a nice hobby, but overall, unless you're a real bookstore with high volume, this is too much work for too little return. For an individual , well, even it can be more than lunch money, it's not by much. (And gosh, I didn't have to review the books I sold! :-)
Interesting, I saw on WB's profile that his nickname was southlandplace I googled that. Here's what I got,
http://search.earthlink.net/search?area=earthlink-ws&q="southlandplace"&channel=totalaccess
It appears from the third result he may be a seller of some sort. However, I can't find him in the list, but I'm suffering from the mother of all head colds and may be missing it. Malleous, it's all yours!
Oh, c'mon, we're not gonna investigate our Friend Top Reviewer W.Boudville, are we. Let him be, he's funny enough as he is. :-)
OK, but it would be fun to know if he's selling the books he's reviewing, ala Gunny wouldn't it?
Hush...
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