Basel group launches highbrow “Go for the Dough” campaign aimed at undergrads

NEW YORK – Citing overwhelming success with their three-year campaign to increase the visibility of financial professionals, the Basel-based Centre for International Finance Certification (CIFC) announced this week that it will begin similar programs aimed at undergraduate students considering careers in finance. Called “Wall Street Simply Isn’t Saturated Enough Yet,” the program will involve a multi-pronged cross-sectional look at the finance, insurance, legal, and tax industries, as well as reasons to stop pursuing impractical career paths in the arts and sciences “like Mom and Dad told you to.”

“This is a considerable step forward for us,” said Genevieve Soubriet, the executive director of the program’s offices in Lausanne, Switzerland. “For the entirety of their early lives, young people are told to follow their dreams, to make their lives extraordinary and superlative, to get out there and change the world. It’s high time we stopped giving them such imbalanced counsel, and just told them to make some serious bank.”

The program, which will be piloted in continental Europe this summer before a Q4 2014 release at US universities, will commence with a variety of breakout sessions piloted by The Apprentice’s Donald Trump, former GE CEO Jack Welch, and Arturo Pinzotti, a distant descendant of the 16^th-century statesman and author Niccolo Machiavelli. Titles include: 

• “Becoming the Billionaire’s Toady: Reflections on the Soul-Crushing but Financially Rewarding Indentured Servitude of Family Office Personnel”
• “Hedge Fund Performance Reviews: How to Minimize Physical Violence and Other Aberrant Investor Behavior”
• “New Adventures in MS Office: How to Turn Emerging Market Power Grids on and off at Your Leisure with Excel (and what it will do for Your Fund’s NAV) 

Joel Redmond, a CNY financial planner and author of the not-yet-galactically-acclaimed book Tradecraft: What Spymasters Can Teach us About Investing, said he wasn’t surprised about the CIFC’s efforts. “We live in an uncertain world,” Redmond said. “Take Family Guy – I never thought a show with such surgical ‘80s humor would make it into a fifth season, usurping even The Simpsons as a comedy iconoclast,” he said. “I suppose there have been current events that have indicated uncertainty as well, of course.”

Redmond, who mentioned that he posts a weblog also aimed at would-be students of finance called The Bricklebrit Algorithm, mentioned a slightly different goal. “I remember Einstein said ‘things should be as simple as possible, but no simpler,’” Redmond said. “Fortunately, anyone reading this blog would agree no jury in the world would ever convict me of making anything in finance simple. I view myself as a solemn steward of the mysteries of finance, sort of like those 9^th century inquisitors who would tie people to the stake if they found prayer books in their room. I think sometimes scarcity gets a bad rap,” he said.

The book Tradecraft is available here: www.unlimitedpublishing.com/redmond

The Bricklebrit Algorithm is here: http://www.tumblr.com/blog/thebricklebritalgorithm

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Basel-based Commission to promote financial field more aggressively, create “twenty-minute designation”

NEW YORK – The Centre for International Finance Certification (CIFC) made a follow-up announcement to its decision last week to enact legislation changing the way members of the accounting and legal professions present their credentials. Commenting on the story is Representative Steven Bacon (D-NY), who has been among the legislation’s most ardent and active proponents.

“I think we all know that Dodd-Frank is making it a smaller world for those who are doing wrong,” Bacon said. “Now we have something that rewards those on the other side of the coin – those financial advisors who are taking the high road,” he said.

Bacon, himself a former institutional trader and private wealth advisor with the storied white-shoe Berne-based Lilliman and Sneer, confirmed the council has indeed saved the best for last: new regs concerning the designations of traditional stockbrokers and financial planners. “There are a few more options in these realms of finance than in other professions, though the choices are a bit anemic,” he said. “One article said there are thousands of designations, though at last count I saw only sixteen hundred or so.” (Bacon was referring to this article: http://www.mainstreet.com/article/money/investing/who-s-who-guide-financial-advisers) “What we’re planning to do here is create opportunity for those who just don’t have the time commitment to study for the Series 7, the Certified Financial Planner Exam, or the various life insurance and investment curricula out there.”

The solution, Bacon said, was deceptively simple: create the twenty-minute designation. “We’re calling it the financial desi-byte,” he said. “We saw immediately that, for example, the pass rates for the Chartered Financial Analyst exams were very low – about 40% or so for the first two levels, and 50% for the third level,” he said. “No financial-advising rank-and-filer is going to get through those tests and still remember to put their pants on zipper-in-front every morning. So instead, why not become a OOQG (On-again Off-again Quant Gal) or a QBDC (Quasi-Bond Duration Cruncher)? We’ve got quite a few others in the mix from this curriculum – it’s very robust,” he said. Additional desi-bytes:

SVLR – Single-Variable Linear Regressor

AAEISP – Assistant to the Assistant of the Editor of the Investment Policy Statement

ACBD, 8 – knows Almost as much as a Central Banker’s 8-year-old Daughter

CMFS – Certified Master of Finance-Speak

KNER – Knows there’s Not Enough money for Retirement

“It strikes me as a bit of overkill,” said Joel Redmond, author of the recently published Tradecraft: What Spymasters Can Teach us About Investing. “It’s kind of like making wives and fathers put ‘Diaper Ace One,’ ‘Youth Hockey Transport Director,’ or ‘Allowance Procurement VP’ after their names on their stationery at work.” 

Bacon agreed that not every aspect of the new legislation is positive, albeit differently. “We’ve had to set a limit of 50 designations per advisor in client and prospect communications,” Bacon said. “It seemed prudent to create some scarcity around these credentials.”

The book Tradecraft is available here: www.unlimitedpublishing.com/redmond.

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International certification council meets, unilaterally agrees world lacks sufficient financial designations

NEW YORK – Citing an alarming trend towards “transparency, clarity and lucidity” among worldwide financial professional ranking institutions, the Basel-based Centre for International Finance Certification (CIFC) today approved preliminary plans to double the count of the world’s financial designations by the year 2020. The move, which was met with unilateral approval among regulators, financial concerns, and securities attorneys alike, is seen as yet another surge in the overarching trend towards what one lawmaker calls “edufinandemonium.”

“Edufinandemonium is basically the art of making financial education slightly more nuanced than it currently is,” Rep. Steven Bacon (D-NY) said. “For example, you have someone who already is a Certified Public Accountant. Under the current regime, this person is only required to use her certification credential in communications with clients and prospective clients: Samantha Knox, CPA. Under the new proposed rule, all who pass the Certified Public Accountancy exam will automatically be granted an additional designation of RSTP – Really Smart Tax Person. We’re also going to require that those with bachelor’s degrees will list BA/BS, and those with masters’ degrees list those as well. Thus, in New York State, we’ve gone from Miss Samantha Knox, CPA, to Miss Samantha Knox, CPA, RSTP, MS (Fin), BS (Fin.). You see? A client meeting for the first time with the first professional might not feel nearly as confident as one meeting with the second.”

According to Bacon, the legislation is estimated to create an instantaneous 4.7 million new designations in the state of New York in its first year alone. Nor, he says, is this the only benefit. “We estimate the amount of additional fees these professionals are going to be able to generate at about $60 billion in the first five years or so,” he said. “Of course, half of that or so will be offset by the incremental costs of printing on both sides of their business cards.” But accountants aren’t the only ones expected to benefit from CIFC’s new legislation. According to Bacon, licensed attorneys also stand to gain from the new regs. “Most attorneys use JD or Esq. after their names – respectively, teacher of law, juris doctor, or Esquire.” (Bacon, himself a 1997 magna cum laude graduate of Yeshiva University’s Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, said he would text its meaning to this reporter later on.) “Since lawyers presumably have undergraduate degrees, we’re going to list those, but we thought of an additional hierarchical calculus,” he said. “You know how in law school, the brightest students generally end up editing the law review or clerking for some prominent judge? From now on, any attorney with that kind of accomplishment is going to be styled IMC – iure malum canem. In English, it means ‘Wicked Righteous Law Dog,’ he said. “Anyone with a 3.5 GPA or above presumably made dean’s list for one semester, and the worldwide designation for these talented professionals will be LO – legis observare, ‘Lawyer to Watch,’ he said. The designations are also cumulative, Bacon added. “This is expected to dramatically change the public’s perception of that hardworking Ivy League attorney who just isn’t able to bill $1,000 an hour on a ‘Gemini Jones, JD.’ But “Gemini M. Jones, JD, Esq., IMC, LO, LLM, BA (Eng.); see website for additional designations?” I can physically hear the client billfolds opening wider,” Bacon said.

Area financial professionals had mixed emotions about the project. “ I’m not sure I’m ready for this – I don’t understand all of the current designations,” said Joel Redmond, a private bank financial planner in Central New York. “Parents already have bumper stickers that say ‘My grade schooler is smarter and prettier than your grade schooler.’ These extra designations are like making those bumper stickers windshield-sized,” he said. “I mean, don’t you think these kids just want to play dodgeball?” 

Redmond is the author of the recently-published Tradecraft: What Spymasters Can teach us About Investing, released on Cyber Monday 2013. He himself said he’ll be affected by the new legislation as well.

“I’m a Certified Financial PlannerÔ professional, so I’d still use that designation,” Redmond said. “But I looked over the laws, and there’s a provision that hasn’t really been widely announced. They actually want you to use designations for unrelated jobs you’ve had in times past. Now, I’ve been a cook, waiter, janitor, parking lot attendant, mobile phone merchant, editor, photographer, reporter, goatherd, and at least ten other things,” Redmond said. “I’m thinking of hiring a stunt double who’s only had one or two jobs to play me in client interactions.”

The book Tradecraft is available here: www.unlimitedpublishing.com/redmond.

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Peace agreement brokered in Middle East, fifteen powers agree to permanent ceasefire after Brooklyn teen “cleans house” listening to self-help tapes

TEL AVIV – The thirty-centuries-old internecine strife between Arab and Jew came to a grinding halt today as what is hailed as the greatest peace agreement of all time was brokered – by a fourteen-year-old from Brooklyn. Only a few weeks after the storied IDF Major General and former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, 87, died not far from his boyhood home in the citrus groves of Kfar Malal, and a decade after the death of the Sharon-styled “irrelevant” PLO leader Yasir Arafat, the heads of state of Israel, Syria, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and ten other Middle Eastern powers covenanted for peace this past week in this Israeli town whose name means ”Hill of Spring.” Succeeding where a dozen presidents, prime ministers, and kings have failed for 66 years, the most incredible part of the unprecedented peace agreement is its broker, who is neither lawyer nor soldier, politician nor statesman. Instead, he is an honors student at P.S. 96 who works at a JCC Laundromat three times a week.

“I think it was the motivational tapes that gave me the strength to see it through,” said Carlos Linstrom, 14, of Brooklyn Heights. “I never really used to be the assertive type, but since I got this deluxe Do it Now! Package for kids, things have really turned around for me.” Lindstrom is referring to self-help guru Shallini Cox’s explosive video, audio, and print series, which have been styled as a medley of positive-thinking and behavioral modification popularized by David Hasselhoff, Anna Nicole Smith, Florence Henderson, and Sherman Helmsley. “I got them initially as a Christmas present,” Linstrom said. “I didn’t think much of them at the beginning, but after listening to them for five or six thousand hours, I started to see things,” he said. “Obviously the first steps were to pick up Arabic, Hebrew, French, Russian, Farsi, Urdu, and Pashtun,” he said. “That took me almost a month, because I had a science project due. Then I had to create a brief sketch of the major military conflicts of the region, all the way from the 1948 War of Independence to the era of Sharon’s noctural reprisal raids, and then on through the Yom Kippur War, the Oslo Accords, and the Netanyahu era,” he said. “Finally came the ultimate test of statecraft: getting the attention of the leaders of these fifteen powers, as well as the United States,” he said. “My dad sort of works with the government, so I thought I might start there,” Linstrom said. “His company does the plumbing for the UN building.”

Realizing he’d need more of an edge to get the peace process rolling, Linstrom decided eventually it was time to play hardball. “I decided to start a weblog of my own,” Linstrom said. “I called it www.heyletsstopfightingandstartlovinginthemiddleeast.com. Then I started posting all of my ideas, and finally I got hold of some high officials in the Israeli Ministry of Defense. At the same time, someone in the royal kingdom of Saudi Arabia bit, and I knew I’d gotten a minyan for my Mid-east coffee klatch,” he said. “Using an algorithm to link to Shar’ia-approved swimwear sites didn’t hurt either, I’m sure,” he said.

What about the origins of the agreement itself? ”My buddy Harold Pinsky is good at English – he gets As on all his papers,” Linstrom said. “I had him write the agreement, and his mom looked it over. She’s a paralegal,” he said.

Linstrom isn’t sure what his next project will be, although he indicated an interest in the world of high finance. “I did tons of espionage research, and I did come across some cool stuff,” Linstrom said. “For example, there’s this book called Tradecraft: What Spymasters Can Teach us About Investing. I thought it would be filled with shoe escape kit, 007-type stuff, but it’s mostly filled with accounting and securities fraud cases,” he said. “There are some decent spy stories in it, though, and the author connects them to the financial fraud cases. I might need money, so I’m going to start playing with this stuff, I think,” he said. “Even if I win a Nobel Peace Prize, I think my mom has to watch the money until I’m 18, so I’m not done taking care of towels at the JCC just yet,” he said.

Tradecraft can be found here: www.unlimitedpublishing.com/redmond.

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CNY author offers behind-the-scenes look at outstanding literary success; explains method behind achieving #822,136- and 1,023,499-best ranked status on Amazon

 SYRACUSE – Despite its charming four-seasons allure, highly affordable cost of living, and outstanding school districts, this Central New York gem isn’t exactly a ground-zero target for literary plaudits. Victor Hugo never set foot here. Dante Alighieri is as much a stranger to it as Marvin Martian. Proust, Goethe, Milton, Shakespeare – none of the plots or characters in their glorious array of story indicate any knowledge of the Salt City. To help remedy this alarming condition, CNY #822,136- and #1,023,499- ranked best-selling author Joel Redmond has decided to share with the Tradecraft blog some of his deepest literary secrets.

“The first trick is not to get weighed down too seriously with nonessentials like plot, character, setting, and theme,” Redmond said. “Basically, I get a burrito, start the stopwatch on my cell phone, and write like Jackson Pollack paints for twenty minutes.” When pressed as to the source of his muse, Redmond sank into a reverie. “I remember hearing this great quote by Woody Allen,” he said. “He said something like ‘I’m all for speed-reading, I get a lot out of it. I speed-read War and Peace, for example, and I can tell you from that it definitely had something to do with Russia.’ It takes guts to read like that, and that’s why I try to write like that,” Redmond said.

Other tips? “I try to always write so I’m almost lying down,” Redmond said. “If you’re too tense, you might say something that will offend someone, and one of your characters might do something interesting,” he said. “I try to make sure all my work reads like a brokerage research report from an analyst who is very, very uncertain of his situation,” Redmond said. “I often nod off in the middle of writing a particularly inspiring passage, and it’s any writer’s hope that his readers experience the same things he does,” Redmond said. “And if there’s nothing good on TV that night, that doesn’t hurt, either.”

Redmond saw overnight success with his April 2011 release of The One-Minute Financial Planner, released by Xlibris; the book sold 7 copies worldwide its first week alone. In December 2013, Unlimited Publishing released the critically-acclaimed-by-Mr. Redmond follow-up work Tradecraft: What Spymasters Can Teach us About Investing, which has already sold three copies a mere month into its publication. The final secret to his success? Giving away something for nothing. “I’m posting the original version of Tradecraft online in a weblog called The Bricklebrit Algorithm,” Redmond said. “It’s basically my way of becoming a TV finance personality without calling all my readers ‘girlfriend’ or hitting a ‘buy’ or ‘sell’ button that sounds like an air raid siren.” And the value to readers? “They’ll find lots of math formulas and to-dos to get wealthy that they can read about and never do, because they're presumably only fluent in English,” Redmond said. “But if they do get wealthy somehow by accidentally implementing some of the advice in there, I can’t be held responsible,” Redmond said. “I have to go now, though. Stopwatch says 24:16,” he said.

Tradecraft can be found here: www.unlimitedpublishing.com/redmond.

The blog is found at http://www.tumblr.com/blog/thebricklebritalgorithm.

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Blog book earns universal acclaim for "uglifying" finance, explaining ten pages' material in two hundred

'I never heard of "Uglification,"' Alice ventured to say. 'What is it?'

The Gryphon lifted up both its paws in surprise. 'What! Never heard of uglifying!' it exclaimed. 'You know what to beautify is, I suppose?'

'Yes,' said Alice doubtfully: 'it means--to--make--anything--prettier.'

'Well, then,' the Gryphon went on, 'if you don't know what to uglify is, you are a simpleton.'

- Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland 

SYRACUSE - Are you convinced finance isn't complicated enough? Are you tired of the excessive simplicity of things like variable annuity prospectuses, the fine print on reverse mortgages, or the taxation of derivatives? Do you believe the world of finance needs to be "uglified," as in the quote above? Most importantly, do you have a desire to maybe potentially become wealthy over a very long time? Then you might have some use for Joel Redmond, a financial planner in this Central New York town whose balmy six degree mornings are gloriously reminiscent of Vladivostok's this time of year. Redmond, who works at an area private bank as a wealth strategist, has just released a weblog with ninety separate financial lessons in it called The Bricklebrit Algorithm.

"I wanted to make sure I continued to enjoy the comforting bosom of total obscurity," Redmond said when asked if he was concerned Google and other search engines would have trouble finding a blog actually titled The Bricklebrit Algorithm. "I mean, people spend all this time agonizing about what to call something, and they want to make sure people can spell it so they can find it on the Internet.I remember a Doonesbury interview Garry Trudeau wrote up with David Halberstam, the great author. Someone asked him, 'What do you do?' And he said, 'I write books. Big books, huge books. The kind of books about which people like to say, 'I own them.' 'Oh. Do these people read them?' 'Very few. Only the best,' Halberstam said. And I knew right away that would be my model," Redmond said.

The weblog, whose original title The Sphincterdinckel Heliodrome was rejected by most New York publishing houses as too conventional, has a priceless ability to bring back the special sensation of being back in a university classroom with "that statistics teacher who spoke extremely halting English, with occasional verbal ejaculations characteristic of Tourette's, but in financial-ese. Most people try and take complicated things and make them simple. What good is that?" Redmond asked. "What takes real talent is to produce 500 pages dedicated to the decision-making process behind a squirrel crossing the road, with equations, graphs, footnotes, and point-and-figure charts. Now, if you can do that - you've got something worth sharing," he said. "Better yet, add some Latin into the mix."

The weblog, which offers three to-do items at the end of each post to help readers implement the blog's principles on ways to become wealthy, comes with an ironclad guarantee, Redmond said. "I feel so strongly about this blog that I offer the absolute guarantee that it would last over one hundred pages single spaced on 8 1/2" by 11" paper using 12 point Times New Roman font if you printed it out," he said. "It may even be more."

According to Redmond, who this writer has observed talking to himself and then, when interrupted, says "I wasn't talking to you - I was addressing the House of Commons," the blog has helped him in his relationships with his peers and friends. "It's true," Redmond said. "Instead of devising a multiple linear regression to determine when I should use the blue toothbrush vs. the green toothbrush, and how many minutes to devote each day to ESPN and how many to devote to Glenn Ford movies, I've learned that not every single thing in life can be handled with an equation," Redmond said. "I have to go now, though. It's 10:30, and I have to get at least 425 minutes of sleep tonight," he said. "I've only gotten a median of 407.25 minutes for the past 75 days, with a 2% margin of error at a 5% confidence level. I need to bring that up or I'm well behind most 42-year-old nonsmoker white males living at 42.5 degrees north latitude with two housecats."

The blog can be found here: http://www.tumblr.com/blog/thebricklebritalgorithm

                                                                          

World’s largest business networking site crashes under unbearable volume of self-improvement materials

PALO ALTO – The Information Age suffered a significant setback today, as Joind.com president and CEO Elina Lampert said the site was closing down for the next six weeks to upgrade its servers and networking hardware. Lampert attributed the cause of the e-gridlock to an “unprecedented” amount of self-help books, e-learning courses, and other materials aimed at helping, basically, “anyone do anything, without any consideration whatsoever of whether it ought to be done or not.”

The site, which after its humble beginnings as just another Silicon Valley startup 7 years ago traded at $359 this week after a May 2011 IPO at $75, apparently incensed its 40 million+ estimated users with what appears to be a permanent posting of its all-too-well-known logo of a yellow “Men At Work” sign and hardhat, modifying its customary “we’ll have things back to normal momentarily” to “we’ll maybe hopefully have things back to normal in approximately six weeks.” 

“I can’t understand it,” said Tina Yardley, a 45-year-old mother of four from Seattle whose recent Fifty Pounds Lighter on Egg Yolks and Cake Batter reached #2 on the best-seller list in Kindle sales on Amazon.com. “My sales all came from Joind – every one of them. What am I supposed to do now?” Yardley was referring to her e-book Clogged Arteries Work Better!, which she gave away for free to her 17,000+ business contacts on the networking website and which was her sole portal to Yolks and Batter. 

But the purveyors of e-counsel weren’t the only ones grousing about the six-week glitch – the users were the hardest hit. Take the case of Tommy Simons, an eleven-year-old in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Simons, a nearsighted and papuliferous sixth-grader with a penchant for Hostess snack cakes and Popular Mechanics, said the site’s going down has “horrible” ramifications for his social life. “I don’t know what to do now,” said Simons. “I have seven girlfriends, but I never learned how to get rid of them,” he said. Simons, who memorized every word of the best-selling e-book How to Get Seventh- and Eighth-Grade Girls to get Bieber Fever – For You!, said he’ll now miss the release of the much-anticipated free follow-up e-tome Grade School Break-Ups Were Never so Easy. Nor is that Simon’s only problem, who also taught himself the best putdowns for eleven-year-olds to use in taverns, learned the five most effective Brazilian jiujitsu submission techniques, and established a worldwide import-export business in light armaments. “I really don’t know what I’m going to do now,” he said.

Some authors are making the best of the situation. Among them is Joel Redmond, the author of a new book on selecting profitable investments and detecting accounting chicanery. Redmond, a Central New York financial planner with over 1,700 connections on the site, says he isn’t all that worried about the six-week hiatus. “I kind of look at Joind.com as a place where you can make up for not having enough people signing your yearbook in high school,” he said. “Do you know how cool it feels to have people from Kuala Lumpur and Hyderabad saying nice things about you, especially when they don’t know anything about you at all? Bonus,” Redmond said.

Redmond’s book Tradecraft: What Spymasters Can Teach us About Investing, was released on Cyber Monday of this year on Amazon.com. Asked if he felt as though he contributed to the Joind.com e-debacle, he waxed bemused. “I don’t really post links to the book on Joind,” Redmond said. “Joind is more of a place where I collect endorsements I mostly haven’t earned from people I mostly don’t know, and hesitantly offer them in return to make the system work faster so my computer won’t crash,” he said. “Facebook and Twitter are for the book, mostly so my family and friends can say witty things like ‘what’s it like writing a best-smeller?’ and wheedle their way into some free copies.”

And what about Redmond’s e-learning mission? “I don’t really follow a lot of that stuff,” he said. “I sort of have a rule that if the author hasn’t been dead fifty years, she’s not all that interesting to me yet.”

The book Tradecraft is available at www.unlimitedpublishing.com/redmond.

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