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Grande Expectations: A Year in the Life of Starbucks' Stock
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.
From the Hardcover edition.
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.
From the Hardcover edition.
- GenresBusinessNonfiction
320 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2007
6 people are currently reading
79 people want to read
About the author
Karen Blumenthal
30 books150 followersKaren Blumenthal is a critically acclaimed author of narrative nonfiction for young people, who is fascinated by controversial subjects and social change. Her books include Steve Jobs: The Man Who Thought Different; Tommy: The Gun that Changed America; Hillary Rodham Clinton: A Woman Living History, and Let Me Play: The Story of Title IX. Her books have won a Sibert Honor and a Jane Addams Children's Book award and have been a finalist for YALSA's Excellence in Nonfiction for Young Adults award three times. She lives in Dallas, where Roe v. Wade originated. For more information, go to www.karenblumenthal.com.
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
August 11, 2016
Being a novice about the world of stocks, the book is a pleasurable and illuminating read. It orients the reader to the mystical world of the stock market with its movements, strategies, workings, jargons, and players. Karen Blumenthal’s focus on a single stock—the Starbucks Coffee—is a pedagogically effective strategy: it engages the reader to an interesting narrative of Starbuck’s story of success; while on the other side, it introduces the movements of the Starbuck’s stock and the stock market.
Grande Expectations, though somehow inexplicit in it, shows that the reason why the stock market, with its numbers and values daily increasing and fluctuating, is to a large extent alien and unpredictable to human mind, is because the human being is still at the core of its movement--the human consumers, with their desires, caprices, whims, trends and bandwagon, and problems and disasters. Beyond the complex mathematical computations and sophisticated models of the stock market employed by the financial analysts to track its volatile rules, trends, and movements (I think this subject belongs to those serious accountants and mathematicians), and beyond some financial strategies (e.g. buy backs, stock splitting), she strongly points that the long-term growth of the company’s market value is still based on the ground level effective production and consumption, the guarantor of investor’s trust.
As a case in point: Blumenthal picks the Starbucks.Following the company in a year, she unveils that beneath Starbuck's increasing market value and investor’s confidence to their shares is the company’s incessant expansion. Back from having four retail stores in Seattle in 1982, it expanded into 9,000 stores, both in US and other countries, after almost two and a half decades of thriving. The company, as one of the investors put it, is a global store machine. Starbucks’ stores have become ubiquitous. And its secret lies in the company’s long-term diligence of producing a premium coffee experience, stimulated by: personalized and flavorful coffees, romantically designed stores, new stuffs (e.g. CDs, gifts, new beverages) occasionally added to the store's inventory, plus a customer service filled with human touch and connection, and a brand-name fashioned as a humane company whose advocacy is not only to supply the world with handcrafted coffees and beverages but also to be conscious to their humanitarian duties. Thus, its end product: more loyal costumers continuously surprised and delighted, and on the flipside, investor’s increasing trust.
Blumenthal’s enthusiasm about the workings of the stock market is contagious, and it helps a lot in engaging her readers. At some point of the text you might even wish someday that you could become a stock broker or a big-time investor and join the game. However, the uncomforting reality lurks that the norms of the stock market, though founded on human production and consumption, is so distant from the world, with its pressing problems, as we experience it. In the face of serious environmental degradation and enormous disparity between the rich and the poor, the stock market, with its sole logic of growth and expansion (perhaps, it can only do so for it to survive), is cold and indifferent about it. Its science’s main concern is to predict and forecast the stock market exact movements, grounded in serious mathematical analysis and mystical human intuition; and its player’s main goal is to know those tendencies forecasted and win the game: to buy stocks with higher dividends, and to sell those that are falling.
Though this reflection pushes Blumenthal’s main point in the book too much, somehow missing her sole point, but one could construe this as a reaction coming from Blumenthal’s enthusiastic narrative of the stock market, as if everything is pretty normal, and as if there’s nothing problematic about it.
Grande Expectations, though somehow inexplicit in it, shows that the reason why the stock market, with its numbers and values daily increasing and fluctuating, is to a large extent alien and unpredictable to human mind, is because the human being is still at the core of its movement--the human consumers, with their desires, caprices, whims, trends and bandwagon, and problems and disasters. Beyond the complex mathematical computations and sophisticated models of the stock market employed by the financial analysts to track its volatile rules, trends, and movements (I think this subject belongs to those serious accountants and mathematicians), and beyond some financial strategies (e.g. buy backs, stock splitting), she strongly points that the long-term growth of the company’s market value is still based on the ground level effective production and consumption, the guarantor of investor’s trust.
As a case in point: Blumenthal picks the Starbucks.Following the company in a year, she unveils that beneath Starbuck's increasing market value and investor’s confidence to their shares is the company’s incessant expansion. Back from having four retail stores in Seattle in 1982, it expanded into 9,000 stores, both in US and other countries, after almost two and a half decades of thriving. The company, as one of the investors put it, is a global store machine. Starbucks’ stores have become ubiquitous. And its secret lies in the company’s long-term diligence of producing a premium coffee experience, stimulated by: personalized and flavorful coffees, romantically designed stores, new stuffs (e.g. CDs, gifts, new beverages) occasionally added to the store's inventory, plus a customer service filled with human touch and connection, and a brand-name fashioned as a humane company whose advocacy is not only to supply the world with handcrafted coffees and beverages but also to be conscious to their humanitarian duties. Thus, its end product: more loyal costumers continuously surprised and delighted, and on the flipside, investor’s increasing trust.
Blumenthal’s enthusiasm about the workings of the stock market is contagious, and it helps a lot in engaging her readers. At some point of the text you might even wish someday that you could become a stock broker or a big-time investor and join the game. However, the uncomforting reality lurks that the norms of the stock market, though founded on human production and consumption, is so distant from the world, with its pressing problems, as we experience it. In the face of serious environmental degradation and enormous disparity between the rich and the poor, the stock market, with its sole logic of growth and expansion (perhaps, it can only do so for it to survive), is cold and indifferent about it. Its science’s main concern is to predict and forecast the stock market exact movements, grounded in serious mathematical analysis and mystical human intuition; and its player’s main goal is to know those tendencies forecasted and win the game: to buy stocks with higher dividends, and to sell those that are falling.
Though this reflection pushes Blumenthal’s main point in the book too much, somehow missing her sole point, but one could construe this as a reaction coming from Blumenthal’s enthusiastic narrative of the stock market, as if everything is pretty normal, and as if there’s nothing problematic about it.
November 9, 2019
It is a good book to look at the various perspectives of stock holders and all those who have a vested interest in a company. Great tips and advice can be found.
March 1, 2015
I found this book while carousing one of my favorite used book stores. The stock market is one of those things I’ve always had a casual interest about, and while I do read The Wall Street Journal every so often, and am somewhat familiar with the terms P/E ratio, stock splits, etc., the concept of following a particular stock for a period of time has been one of those items perpetually on my to-do list, like watching “Breaking Bad” or learning home maintenance.
If you think about it, treating a stock or stocks isn’t that much different than following a sports team’s travails – generally there’s something about the team/business that you like, you may or may not have a vested interest in the business/team’s success, there are generally plenty of statistics to track its success, some of whose meaning isn’t within the grasp of most. To the argument “Watching my favorite team on television is entertaining, following a stock is not”… well, I suppose there’s a point there, but there are some businesses which try to make themselves more palpable to the general public. Conversely, one can’t argue that sports franchises themselves aren’t businesses – try walking into a stadium without a ticket someday and see how well that works.
Karen Blumenthal does a generally good job in following Starbucks as if it were a sports team – I’m really surprised this hasn’t been done more often. The book is divided into fourteen chapters – one for each month January 2005 through 2006 plus an epilogue. Generally speaking, each deals with a different aspect of the business world, i.e. analysts, the history and development of the brand, and the perspective of the shareholder to name a few. Blumenthal also does a credible job in relating Starbucks’ stock experience to the events of the year, whether they be expected (Christmas) or unexpected (Hurricane Katrina), and makes a rather de facto argument that this stock is relatively immune to noise that invariably occurs.
A good read for someone who wants to know a bit more about how business works without diving too deep.
If you think about it, treating a stock or stocks isn’t that much different than following a sports team’s travails – generally there’s something about the team/business that you like, you may or may not have a vested interest in the business/team’s success, there are generally plenty of statistics to track its success, some of whose meaning isn’t within the grasp of most. To the argument “Watching my favorite team on television is entertaining, following a stock is not”… well, I suppose there’s a point there, but there are some businesses which try to make themselves more palpable to the general public. Conversely, one can’t argue that sports franchises themselves aren’t businesses – try walking into a stadium without a ticket someday and see how well that works.
Karen Blumenthal does a generally good job in following Starbucks as if it were a sports team – I’m really surprised this hasn’t been done more often. The book is divided into fourteen chapters – one for each month January 2005 through 2006 plus an epilogue. Generally speaking, each deals with a different aspect of the business world, i.e. analysts, the history and development of the brand, and the perspective of the shareholder to name a few. Blumenthal also does a credible job in relating Starbucks’ stock experience to the events of the year, whether they be expected (Christmas) or unexpected (Hurricane Katrina), and makes a rather de facto argument that this stock is relatively immune to noise that invariably occurs.
A good read for someone who wants to know a bit more about how business works without diving too deep.
June 11, 2010
Grande Expectations claims to be the first book that follows the ups and downs of one stock over the course of a year. The chosen industry is one that is close to the hearts (and tummies) of investors worldwide, coffee company Starbucks. Perhaps the choice is such that the average reader will not have to drown himself in industry jargon. But the colourful character of its founder Charles Schultz could also be the other reason why the beverage company has been chosen as its subject, as you will soon find out why once you pick up the book.
The work is a timely read. Business editor Karen Blumenthal has done a good job in charting the rise and fall of the stock over the course of 2005-2006 all in just 273 pages. You will understand how certain political and geographical events worldwide affect a particular stock counter, as she has made this immaculate link easy to see.
Other useful features are the little stories peppered along the chapters which give an insightful peek of how corporate governance and Wall Street politics works, especially the deal with mutual fund managers and how they manipulate their books to a more glossy finish.
But the writing got a little too narrative at time. I could understand the author's intention in making the work a little less pudgy with anecdotes and interviews. But the lines after lines of dialogues and sunset descriptions was too draggy for my liking.
However all is not lost as the reader will walk away with a tip on two before sinking their money into another 4-letter ticker symbol.
The work is a timely read. Business editor Karen Blumenthal has done a good job in charting the rise and fall of the stock over the course of 2005-2006 all in just 273 pages. You will understand how certain political and geographical events worldwide affect a particular stock counter, as she has made this immaculate link easy to see.
Other useful features are the little stories peppered along the chapters which give an insightful peek of how corporate governance and Wall Street politics works, especially the deal with mutual fund managers and how they manipulate their books to a more glossy finish.
But the writing got a little too narrative at time. I could understand the author's intention in making the work a little less pudgy with anecdotes and interviews. But the lines after lines of dialogues and sunset descriptions was too draggy for my liking.
However all is not lost as the reader will walk away with a tip on two before sinking their money into another 4-letter ticker symbol.
February 24, 2015
Educational. Not quite as entertaining as I thought it might be, but then again I'm not sure why it would be. But it was very informative, and even though I've spent a few years studying this stuff (as in business school) I'm still fascinated by these stories of people who take a simple concept or idea and make a multi-million dollar empire out of it. Not a relatively high rating, but worth the read.
July 9, 2007
This book satisfied my desire for coffee. I read it during a long bus ride in rural China, where no one drinks coffee. Not hard to understand by any means. I think the author did a nice job of making financial markets interesting and accessible. I would recommend this book to anyone wanting a simple introduction to the stock market.
December 5, 2010
A rather objective look at the rhetoric-riddled world of equities. The author presents the history, facts and figures of the company, interviews key figures in the Starbucks hierarchy and various fund managers, and leaves the readers to form their own conclusions.
July 28, 2007
A year in the life of Starbucks stock
Read
November 5, 2008I am having to read this for a security regulations class- I'm unsure of how exciting it will be though...
February 3, 2008
Yes, I was a Starbucks junkie. The book gave me insight to the "evil empire" in terms of its life on the stock market.
Read
October 28, 2008This is the story of a stock analyst following Starbucks stock over the course of a year. Interesting to see things from the perspective of Wall Street.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews