Investcorp Buys Austrian Online Firm For $178 Million

Everyone loves a good book on investing, economics, or a fresh take on finance. With all of the titles floating around out there, though, it can be hard to sort through the pile. "Doug Kass has a terrific reading list," says Blackstone Vice Chairman Byron Wien. Kass, the widely-followed portfolio manager who is president and founder of Seabreeze Partners Management, gave us a list of his 31 favorite titles he recommends investors should read.The Most Important Thing By Howard Marks "Informed by a lifetime of experience and study, The Most Important Thing explains the keys to successful investment and the pitfalls that can destroy capital or ruin a career. Utilizing passages from his memos to illustrate his ideas, Marks teaches by example, detailing the development of an investment philosophy that fully acknowledges the complexities of investing and the perils of the financial world. Brilliantly applying insight to today's volatile markets, Marks offers a volume that is part memoir, part creed, with a number of broad takeaways." Click here for more info > Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds By Charles Mackay "Why do otherwise intelligent individuals form seething masses of idiocy when they engage in collective action? Why do financially sensible people jump lemming-like into hare-brained speculative frenzies--only to jump broker-like out of windows when their fantasies dissolve? We may think that the Great Crash of 1929, junk bonds of the '80s, and over-valued high-tech stocks of the '90s are peculiarly 20th century aberrations, but Mackay's classic--first published in 1841--shows that the madness and confusion of crowds knows no limits, and has no temporal bounds." Click here for more info > The Money Game By Adam Smith "The Money Game, written by one who signs himself 'Adam Smith' (and who some believe is Harvard-and-Oxford-trained George J. W. Goodman), is a modern-day classic. Like many modern paintings, the book looks simple. But as W. Somerset Maugham said about an unforgettable Mondrian abstraction: 'It looks as though you had only to take a ruler, a tube of black paint and a tube of red, and you could do the thing yourself. Try!' "—Professor Paul A. Samuelson, First American Nobel Prize Winner in Economics." Click here for more info > See the rest of the story at Business Insider Please follow Money Game on Twitter and Facebook.    

When it comes to corporate compliance with anti-bribery laws, a one-size-fits-all approach may yield the best results, according to Dan Chapman, chief compliance officer at Houston-based Parker Drilling Co. (NYSE: PKD). As energy companies engage in drilling operations in foreign lands more often, Chapman’s advice may be worth a listen. Under his leadership, Parker Drilling settled a multimillion-dollar case with the Justice Department and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on alleged…

North Korea on Saturday launched three short-range missiles into the Sea of Japan, apparently as part of a military drill, South Korea's defence ministry said. US and South Korean forces had been on heightened alert for a medium-range ballistic missile test in recent weeks amid tensions triggered by North Korea's nuclear test in February. "North Korea launched two guided missiles in the morning and another one in the afternoon," a defence ministry spokesman told AFP. "The missiles landed in the East Sea (Sea of Japan)," he said. South Korea was maintaining intense surveillance of the North and keeping a high-level of readiness to deal with any risky developments, he added. North Korea sometimes launches short-range missiles for tests or as part of military drills. "A more detailed analysis will be needed but the missiles launched may be a modified anti-ship missile or the KN-02 surface-to-surface missile derived from the Soviet era SS-21 that has a range of about 120 kilometres," a Seoul official told Yonhap news agency. The launches followed a joint South Korea-US naval exercise this week, slammed by North Korea as a "wanton" provocation and rehearsal for war. A US defence official said last week that two North Korean Musudan medium-range missiles that had been primed for firing as tensions flared in the run-up to the North's national celebrations on April 15 had been moved from their launch site. Musudan missiles have an estimated range of 2,500 to 4,000 kilometres (1,500 to 2,500 miles), enough to reach South Korea and Japan and potentially US military bases on the Pacific island of Guam. US and South Korean officials had been worried that any test of the medium-range missiles would trigger a fresh surge in tensions, which escalated after the North carried out a nuclear test in February. UN sanctions imposed after the test triggered a cycle of escalating military tensions on the Korean peninsula that are only now beginning to subside. An aide to the Japanese prime minister returned home from a controversial trip to North Korea on Saturday, fuelling speculation that Pyongyang may be trying to thaw icy relations with Japan. At the height of the tensions, Pyongyang threatened pre-emptive nuclear strikes on the United States and South Korea. Copyright (2013) AFP. All rights reserved. Please follow Military & Defense on Twitter and Facebook.Join the conversation about this story »    

Two commuter trains packed with rush-hour commuters collided in an accident that sent about 70 people to the hospital, severely damaged the tracks and threatened to snarl travel in the congested Northeast Corridor.    

It was a busy week of market news.