I'll be speaking in London next week and hope that you will join us:

Straight from the Horse's Mouth: How Professional Investors Elicit Maximum Information in Minimum Time from Industry Sources

Sponsored by the Harvard Business School Club of London Thursday, September 7, 6:30pm Offices of McKinsey & Co., 1 Jermyn Street near Piccadilly Circus, London RSVP and prepayment: http://www.hbsa.org.uk/cgi/hbs?do=index&page=event&event=222

Cost: £10.00

"Interviewing industry sources requires a broad range of skills which I didn't learn in business school: rapport-building; how to open a conversation to start off on the right foot; how to close a conversation and keep the door still open. Nitron Advisors has helped me to interact with experts more effectively, learn more from them, and make better trading decisions. Nitron showed me how to ask the right questions... And how to help an expert teach me how to ask the right questions! Any investor without this skill set is at a significant disadvantage in the war for alpha." - Partner, Multistrategy/Convertible/Credit Arb $500M fund, New York, NY

As a professional investor, you speak every day with corporate management, with industry sources, and with other knowledgeable experts. However, are you getting as much information as possible? Do your sources pro-actively contact you with new investment ideas? Do you have access to the right sources for your business?

David Teten, CEO of research firm Nitron Advisors, will fill the gap. Come learn:

+ How can I learn the most information possible from industry sources?
+ What questions should I ask?
+ What are the killer phrases NOT to say?
+ How do I build a pool of knowledgeable sources in the industries in which I invest?
+ What questions prompt sources to share their most valuable information?
+ What are the legal and ethical guidelines that I should think about when speaking with sources?

There are countless books on how to read a balance sheet or an income statement. However, when you actually measure how professional investors spend their time, they spend perhaps half of it talking with management, attending conferences, and in other ways learning from industry sources. Yet, there's not a single book on Amazon or course in business schools on how to do that effectively. We fill this gap.

Who is Nitron Advisors?

Nitron Advisors provides professional investors with precise answers to their questions about specific companies and industries, by tapping our exclusive Circle of Experts of thousands of knowledgeable industry insiders. You can learn directly from the Experts through private telephone consultations, in-person customized surveys, and interactive events. We provide access to senior executives, local managers, technologists, suppliers, customers, and regulatory observers. We specialize in connecting you with executives in transition.

By the nature of our business, we have developed an in-house expertise in elicitation, and developed this training program for our clients as a "User's Guide" to our services.

"By talking with a Nitron Advisors expert, our…conversation led to north of a million dollar profit for us and our clients. Within 48 to 72 hours, I was trading facts with the actual person we wanted to be connected to, and that allowed us to form an extremely fast, investable idea." - Lyron Bentovim, Managing Director, SKIRITAI Capital, New York Post, August 7, 2005

Biography of Speaker

David Teten is CEO of Nitron Advisors.

 David is also the lead author of The Virtual Handshake: Opening Doors and Closing Deals Online, the first business book about how to use online networks to accelerate sales and raise capital.

He runs TheVirtualHandshake.com resource site and blog and co-writes a monthly column for FastCompany.com. David recently was named a "2005 Future HR Leader" by Human Capital magazine for Nitron Advisors' unique use of social software for recruiting.

 David serves on the Advisory Board of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association and of Accolo, a recruitment process outsourcer.

David is a frequent keynote speaker at finance and technology industry conferences and at such universities as Wharton, Columbia Business School, Yale, and Princeton.

He formerly was CEO of GoldNames, an investment bank focusing on serving the internet domain name asset class.

 He has worked with Bear Stearns' Investment Banking division as a member of their technology/defense mergers and acquisitions team, and was a strategy consultant with Mars & Co. David holds a Harvard MBA and a Yale BA.

General | Private Equity Investing | Public Markets Investing

Do you want to break free of Microsoft's grip? Use exclusively web-based apps, most of them free? If you do, try reviewing Ismael Ghalimi's list of 'best-of-breed' web apps, which together provide a reasonable approximation of the Microsoft Office Suite. http://itredux.com/blog/office-20/my-office-20-setup/

General | Social Software | Personal Productivity

A useful service I've been playing with is Google SMS:

Google SMS is a new service that enables you to search for certain kinds of information with Google from a mobile phone or handheld device (such as a Blackberry), and returns your search results as text messages. Get phone book listings, movie showtimes, weather, facts, dictionary definitions, product prices from Froogle, and more.

For example (via Speakernet news): send "Pizza 91320" to the phone number 46645 (GOOGL spelled with the numeric phone keys) and you will receive a text message back with all the pizza joints in that ZIP code. Google SMS

General | Personal Productivity

From Harvard Business School Working Knowledge:

The researchers identified four successful tactics for obtaining stretchwork that were common to both groups:

* Differentiate competence. Anyone hoping to advance must distinguish his or her performance on the job. This is particularly true, however, for contract workers—because they are paid for each short-term job, their employers are likely to subject their work to close, frequent evaluation.

* Acquire referrals. Because high-tech contractors tend to work with a number of clients, brokers, and fellow contractors, they enjoy a broader social network from which to draw referrals than most permanent employees. In the film industry—where most hiring is done based on a production manager's previous experience with an individual—referrals are a vital aspect of getting any job, particularly if it stretches a worker in a new direction.

* Framing and bluffing. "This is one of the most creative attributes for obtaining stretchwork," O'Mahony notes. "People who are good at presenting their prior experience in a way that allows for an easy translation to the desired job can narrow the gap between their past experience and future capabilities." Adopting a hybrid job title to identify oneself—"director-screenwriter," for example—can also help establish authority in more than one area.

* Discounting. Accepting pay below the market rate is a temporary disadvantage some contract workers are willing to accept, if it means gaining the experience and exposure that will lead to a new position. One technical writer put it this way: "I turned down solid offers from three companies, all paying over $100K a year…I would take a job at $55K if they're using a totally new technology so I learn something…It's like playing pool…You hit the green ball with the white ball, and the point is to place the white ball to get the next shot. So I take that job in order to learn skills for my next project."

More...

Career Acceleration | General | Leadership and Management | Personal Productivity

* Get to sleep faster * Tackle problems in your sleep * Take efficient power naps * Take a caffeine nap * Get baby to sleep through the night * Sleep on an airplane * Get up when you really want to * Hold that thought till morning * Relax with Pzizz more...

General | Personal Productivity

There's a product liability lawsuit waiting to happen here:

Studying with diligent friends is fine, says Heidi Lessing, a University of Delaware sophomore. But after a couple of hours, it's time for a break, a little gossip: "I want to talk about somebody walking by in the library." One of those friends, however, is working too hard for dish -- way too hard. Instead of joining in the gossip, "She says, 'Be quiet,' " Lessing says, astonishment still registering in her voice. Her friend's attention is laserlike, totally focused on her texts, even after an evening of study. "We were so bored," Lessing says. But the friend was still "really into it. It's annoying." The reason for the difference: Her pal is fueled with "smart pills" that increase her concentration, focus, wakefulness and short-term memory.

more at A Dose of Genius

General | Personal Productivity | Leadership and Management | Career Acceleration

A grammatical blunder may force Rogers Communications Inc. to pay an extra $2.13-million to use utility poles in the Maritimes after the placement of a comma in a contract permitted the deal's cancellation. ... Language buffs take note — Page 7 of the contract states:

The agreement "shall continue in force for a period of five years from the date it is made, and thereafter for successive five year terms, unless and until terminated by one year prior notice in writing by either party."

 Rogers' intent in 2002 was to lock into a long-term deal of at least five years. But when regulators with the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) parsed the wording, they reached another conclusion.

The validity of the contract and the millions of dollars at stake all came down to one point — the second comma in the sentence.

 Had it not been there, the right to cancel wouldn't have applied to the first five years of the contract and Rogers would be protected from the higher rates it now faces.

“Based on the rules of punctuation," the comma in question “allows for the termination of the [contract] at any time, without cause, upon one-year's written notice," the regulator said.

more Via metafilter

General | Personal Productivity

Thanks to the American Mathematical Society, Dartmouth is giving away the much-praised textbook, Introduction to Probability by Charles M. Grinstead and J. Laurie Snell, as free etext. The website also includes computer programs to go along with the book. Link Via http://www.boingboing.net/2006/07/03/introduction_to_prob.html

General | Personal Productivity | Leadership and Management | Career Acceleration | Private Equity Investing | Public Markets Investing | Securities Research

Via Scott Allen:

One of the few e-mail newsletters I read from top to bottom every month is Springwise, which features hot new business ideas from around the world. These may be local/regional businesses that can be duplicated in your area, or just an early player in a new market segment that is still wide open to new entrants.

The current issue features stories on:

Car Prices by Text Message
Car shoppers can check retail and blue book prices via cell phone.

Boutique Wines Online
Advice, discounts and access to boutique wineries not generally available at your local liquor store.

Dinner in the Sky
This one's kind of wacky - you'll just have to see it.

Luxury Convenience Store
In England, it's Harrod's. Imagine a Neiman-Marcus Corner Store in your neighborhood.

Repackaging Barcodes
Graphic designers are turning plain old barcodes into an integral part of the packaging.

Social Money
New tools help people who share bills or who lend and borrow money among friends to keep track of it. The latest issue of Business 2.0 predicts this is a $100 billion industry.

Subscriptions to Springwise are free. If you like it, be sure to check out their sister publication, Trendwatching, which covers new consumer trends.

General | Personal Productivity | Leadership and Management

I normally don’t discuss political topics on this blog, but this particularly struck me as an example of one of my favorite themes: the importance of 'peeling the onion'.

At first glance, it's just a picture of smoke from damaged buildings from the conflict in the Mideast. At second glance, it's a fine example of how not to embellish news photos.

Photo at http://imagesocket.com/view/reuters_fakee3e.png (original photo was pulled.) If you can’t figure out what’s wrong, see http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/53640 Via Metafilter Update: Reuters fired the photographer involved.

General | Personal Productivity

The August issue of Scientific American takes a deep look at how experts--chess grandmasters, musicians, physicians--develop their abilities.

Ericsson argues that what matters is not experience per se but "effortful study," which entails continually tackling challenges that lie just beyond one's competence.

That is why it is possible for enthusiasts to spend tens of thousands of hours playing chess or golf or a musical instrument without ever advancing beyond the amateur level and why a properly trained student can overtake them in a relatively short time.

It is interesting to note that time spent playing chess, even in tournaments, appears to contribute less than such study to a player's progress; the main training value of such games is to point up weaknesses for future study.

Even the novice engages in effortful study at first, which is why beginners so often improve rapidly in playing golf, say, or in driving a car.

 But having reached an acceptable performance--for instance, keeping up with one's golf buddies or passing a driver's exam--most people relax.

 Their performance then becomes automatic and therefore impervious to further improvement.

In contrast, experts-in-training keep the lid of their mind's box open all the time, so that they can inspect, criticize and augment its contents and thereby approach the standard set by leaders in their fields.

More... via Boingboing

General | Leadership and Management | Personal Productivity