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WANTED: UNDERDOGS WITH ATTITUDE I've got some alternative currency, and I'm willing to give it to interns who can do part-time work for me to help me with publicity for my new book on global finance . I'm going to be resuming work on the London School of Financial Activism soon too, so there are possibilities to get involved there as well. Up for grabs: Alternative currency for alternative work I'd like open-minded people who are keen to learn more about alternative finance. I'll be straight up with you though: Some of it is total drudge work, like trawling through a list of 100 institutions and finding email addresses for them. I have a series of discreet tasks y ou can volunteer for in exchange for  a bounty in certain esoteric currencies I've got from selling my book. Choices include: Bitcoin:  Not only is this an interesting experience to use in itself, but you get to tell people at parties that you're paid in cryptocurrency Brixton Pounds:  I'd lik...

My new book, The Heretic's Guide to Global Finance: Hacking the Future of Money,  is now officially out, published by the superb Pluto Press. Boom! I've set up a  dedicated page for it here , and a Facebook page for it here . 3 THINGS YOU WILL LEARN FROM THIS BOOK After reading this book, you will be an ass-kicking financial fighting monk on a mission to hack the future of money. The book uses a unique three part structure to achieve this: Part 1: Exploring This is where you learn the wiring under the bonnet of the global financial system. You'll see the circuitry of investment banks, commercial banks, institutional investors, hedge funds, and private equity funds, and explore investment processes, trading culture, and much much more as well. Part 2: Jamming: This is the part where we learn how to bend the circuits of global finance. I cover how to destabilise investment cases in damaging projects, how to uncover information in opaque corporate structures, and how to design...

As anyone who doesn't have a degree in advanced computer science knows, Bitcoin is conceptually tricky. Thus, when your grandmother is wanting to buy marijuana off the  Silk Road  and begins asking you to explain Bitcoin to her, what do you do? Ever since early 2012, when I asked the question ' what the hell is Bitcoin? ', I've been trying to find ways to explain it to myself. Initially I used the example of the Borg from Star Trek, but more recently I've come to believe that one key to describing it is to start from normal currency, and to then describe Bitcoin in relation to that, rather than trying to describe it as a standalone phenomenon. I'm no Bitcoin expert, so this is still a work-in-progress (Warning!), but next time granny asks you, here's a rough-and-ready way you might lay down the foundations (I've deliberately included a lot of repetition, because that's important when learning). 1) Start from physical cash We all have a basic understa...

WELCOME TO OUR TREASURY: HERE BE DRAGONS The global commodity trading giant Glencore once had an internal hedge fund that made proprietary bets on global markets. It was called Asteri Capital . What do you think it bet on? Most people would probably make an educated guess and say commodities, but   they'd be wrong. It bet on global credit markets, bonds, structured credit products and credit derivatives that have nothing to do with commodities. Weirdness level 1: Why did Glencore have a credit hedge fund? Ok, that's pretty weird. Why would a commodity company like Glencore have a bond-trading hedge fund? Asteri Capital actually started life as something called Glencore Finance AG, and was, for all intents and purposes, just a proprietary trading desk within Glencore, based out of its 50 Berkeley Street office in London. It furthermore appears that it was originally just part of Glencore's treasury , the part of the firm that deals with things like borrowing money for the da...

KICKSTART IT BABY My Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign for a finance activism school was a great success. I managed to raise double my initial target, which is a good sign. I also learned a few useful things about the process along the way, which I thought I'd share with people who're thinking about running their own crowdfunding campaigns. Here they are: Choosing a platform There are plenty of articles on what crowdfunding platform to choose , so I won't repeat those here in any detail. I used Indiegogo because it offered the flexible funding campaign - which means you get to keep whatever money you receive even if you don't hit your target. That was appropriate for me because the perks I was offering were limited edition copies of my forthcoming book ( The Heretic's Guide to Global Finance ) and in a sense I was pre-selling them at a premium to fund the School. Thus, even in the event of the campaign failing to hit its target, people still would have ended up with...

I've taken a leap into the world of crowdfunding this week as I launch   my first Indiegogo campaign . I'm aiming to  raise seed funding for a London-based School of Financial Activism . Please do click on the link to take a look at the campaign, and if you feel inspired, I'd love for you to contribute to it! As I've already mentioned in a previous post, I've got a book on the financial system coming out called The Heretic's Guide to Global Finance: Hacking the Future of Money . I want to launch the School of Financial Activism as a way to build on themes I've developed in the book, and to help everyday people grapple with and challenge the financial sector. As a reward for contributing, I'm offering four uber-cool limited edition series of the book, as follows: The Junior Trader series : 100 softcovers, signed and delivered The Hardass Cityboys : 25 hardcovers, one for each of the 25 wards of the City of London, along with a discount voucher for the ...

USE PEARLTREES INSTEAD BRO I've been experimenting with Pearltrees as a tool for financial education. If you've never used Pearltrees before, it's a cool technology for arranging information, sites and other media into organisational trees. I used it in my last post on Goldman Sachs to show how the company is arranged, and this week I've been experimenting with it as a tool to visually represent the FTSE 100 index. The FTSE 100 is an index of the 100 largest publicly-listed companies in the UK, constituting a major chunk of the UK economy. You can explore the Pearltree in the box below, but for greater functionality, go direct to it here . FTSE 100 and Food Producers / Support Services / Mining in Mega-Indices / (suitpossum) Click on the various pearls to explore the diagram. Clicking on an individual company launches a pop-up window with information. As you can see, it's a pretty simple and intuitive way to present an otherwise abstract list of companies, allo...