Product Description

Karen Blumenthal, like most people, is mystified by the stock market. Just why is it, she wonders, that seemingly good news can send a stock plummeting and bad news can send it skyrocketing again?

In Grande Expectations, she shows how money is made and lost by following one of America’s hottest growth stocks, Starbucks, through a year of rapid store openings, fancy new drinks, and clever promotions, revealing how the many players—big and small investors, company management, analysts, and the media—propel its shares up and down.

Blumenthal pulls back the curtain on the stock market to expose its quirks and inner workings, from the power of a penny of earnings and the unexpected impact of a stock split to the image-enhancing effects of a brand of bottled water. With a fly-on-the-wall, character-driven narrative, Grande Expectations not only makes investing interesting but also will help you make smarter and savvier investing choices by:

•Understanding how big pension and mutual fund managers decide whether to buy more Starbucks—or dump it

•Seeing the unique ways that analysts and other finance professionals assess an investment—dissecting not only the numbers but also the company’s management, demographics, and global opportunities

•Learning how Starbucks executives manage our expectations and keep excitement percolating about the business—and the stock

•Watching how a stock is traded and how that might affect your buying or selling

•Gleaning how multibillion-dollar private hedge funds make money on infinitesimal changes in a stock’s price

•Entering the dark, strange world of the short sellers

•Realizing how different people can make absolutely opposite bets and all still come out ahead

You’ll come away with new insights into how the stock market really works—the power of expectations, stock buybacks, and profits—and explore Starbucks’ phenomenal growth and whether it is sustainable. By unraveling the market’s mysteries, Grande Expectations shows how investing can be both profitable and understandable. Get ready for the ride of your life—and a lifetime of fruitful stock market success.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #482005 in Books
• Published on: 2007-04-03
• Released on: 2007-04-03
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 320 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Blumenthal, a business journalist with more than 25 years of experience, puts her prodigious talents to work distilling a solid drama from the 2005 stock performance of steaming-hot coffee company Starbucks. Having been given access to the Starbucks' corporate office, the annual shareholders' meeting and other inner sanctums, Blumenthal (Let Me Play: The Story of Title IX) provides an outside expert's colorful, considered viewpoint on the caffeinated personalities behind the company's success, and the stock they propel, during a particularly tumultuous year: Hurricane Stan in Central America, a Starbucks stock split and the IPO of rival Caribou Coffee. Alongside prescient data analysis, Blumenthal provides intriguing glimpses of the culture: "Shareholders huddled around tables bulging with stacks of muffins... and lined up ten deep at espresso bars. Emergency medical personnel actually tended to an older man who appeared to be having heart problems." Blumenthal's transition between statistics and scenes of corporate color can be abrupt, but the intimate detail into which she delves makes this book stand out from the business-profile pack, and it's got enough narrative finesse to make it a fun read for both committed investors and the NYSE-curious.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
Wall Street Journal bureau chief Blumenthal is a seasoned financial reporter, yet she admits that the stock market mystifies her. Her mission: to follow one stock closely for a year (2005) to gain insights on how the market works, and, ultimately, become a better investor. There could not have been a better choice than Starbucks (stock symbol SBUX). A favorite of the growth investing crowd, it's sexy, yet familiar, a phenomenal achiever that tends to go through stomach-churning gyrations. As the year unfolds, we attend the annual shareholders' meeting, learn the history of Starbucks, and find out the significance of stock buybacks, (legal) insider trading, stock splits, and analysts' reports. We get an inside view on how institutional investors, the big players like mutual funds and hedge funds, value a stock, as these big guns trade in and out of SBUX in blocks of 10,000 or more shares. While managing to take some of the mystery out of the market's machinations, Blumenthal provides insights and tools for the individual investor looking to "take the plunge." David Siegfried
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
"If you want to know why a stock goes up and down, if you want to be able to make money with that information, this book is for you. I have never ever seen such an indepth and fascinating look at how a growth stock works. This book, while having a great read on Starbucks, transcends that one stock and gives you a tremendous insight into how the whole market works."
--Jim Cramer, Markets commentator for thestreet.com and host of CNBC’s Mad Money with Jim Cramer


From the Hardcover edition.

Customer Reviews

Packed full of insights -- and just plain fun to read!
I've been amazed over the years at how many really smart, successful people -- CEOs, doctors, lawyers, etc. -- get utterly flummoxed by the way that the stock market works. Their own investments never do as well as they hoped. And if they have a big personal stake in the financial fate of some company, they're constantly frustrated by Wall Street's apparently fickle treatment of the company's actions and prospects.

For anyone who's been stuck in that quandary -- and haven't we all? -- Karen Blumenthal's book is a ray of sunshine. She astutely focuses on Starbucks, a well-known company that we all "sort of" understand. Then, chapter by chapter, she takes us behind the scenes to show how this company's financial destiny is really being shaped.

Some parts reminded me of a high-stakes judo match. (Short-sellers vs. everyone else.) Other sections read more like the journal of a lone explorer in dangerous territory (Individual investors trying to make the right decisions.) And the book's examination of hedge-fund strategies is like looking at your own blood under a microscope. It's a lucid peek at a hidden world that's packed full of weird action all the time.

For anyone whose life can be helped -- or hurt -- by what happens in the stock market, this is a fascinating and enormously valuable book.

Otherwise dry material rendered frappalicious
I seldom go to Starbucks and can rarely stomach lengthy financial analysis, so I never expected to be so consumed by a book that I just happened across and then couldn't put down. As a liberal-arts-type reader, I was as riveted by this utterly charming biography of a stock as I routinely am by a great man's life story. As originally unappetizing to me as the thought of 300 pages detailing a company's year-long stock performance was the sheer pleasure here of following the author's wide-eyed pursuit of answers about why stocks rise and fall. As Ms. Blumenthal chases down a broad swath of individuals to learn all she could about the history and future prospects for Starbucks, I found the questions she put to Howard Schultz and other company execs, to security analysts and fund managers, to small DIY investors, and to many others, were exactly the kind of questions I wanted asked. Assuming you're not already a full-time securities pro, reading this book -- although it won't instantly certify you as a financial guru -- will, for less than the cost of a few macchiatos and frappucinos, make you far wiser about this amazing company and the ways of the market. Concentrating so deeply on one company enables the author to show how stock buybacks, black-box trading operations, analyst reports, and dozens of other abstract concepts actually work in a real-world case history over an extended period. Thus material that would otherwise seem academic and dry becomes far more palatable and understandable. Kudos to Ms. Blumenthal for wonderful reporting and making stock-tracking acutely interesting and intelligible.

Grande Explanation
This is a highly readable and interesting story about a cultural phenomena. The author gives us a "year-in-the life" story about Starbucks and its stock price fluctuations, while engaging the reader in behind the scenes details. She has woven a fascinating story without losing the reader to arcane financial jargon. The book is very balanced and a fun read. I highly recommend it -- Steve