For the fourth month in a row, Bank of England interest rates will remain at the record low of 0.5%. In an announcement today, the UK's central bank said it would not expand its quantitative easing of financial markets, much to the surprise of the market. The bank has been buying up assets aggressively, printing cash to finance what is likely to be £125 billion in purchases by the end of this month.

Financial markets expected a much different play, involving an increase in this asset purchase target by another £25 billion (to £150 billion). This move would have let the Bank of England shove even more money into the economy through next month, which is when the bank publishes its latest quarterly economic forecast.

So far, China's effort to slow its economy is not working.

China's economy continues to grow at double-digit rates. Commodity and resource utilization remain high, speculative excesses abound, and exports? China's trade surplus keeps soaring, with the United States and Europe incurring rising trade deficits.

The Chinese government announced that over the past 12 months, China's trade deficit with Europe increased an alarming 46% to $135 billion, The New York Times reported. Over the same period, the trade deficit with the United States did not increase as much, in percentage terms, up 18%, but in absolute terms the U.S. still leads the pack with a daunting $162 billion trade deficit.

Surging trade surplus

Further, during the past 12 months, China's overall trade surplus exceeded $250 billion, including a record $27 billion in October 2007.

I'm a little bit hesitant to write a review of Gerald Appel's latest book Opportunity Investing: How to profit when stocks advance, stocks decline...inflation runs rampant, prices fall, oil prices hit the roof...and every time in between. I consider myself a bottom-up fundamentals investor, and this essentially a book about investing based on macroeconomic trends with a lot of market timing information (but also some good background on economics). So I am probably not the target audience for this book.

That said, it's a pretty good guide to a style of investing that some will be more inclined to embrace than others. If you're a foreign policy junkie (you read The Economist, listen to All Things Considered, and enjoy the New York Times more than the Wall Street Journal), this is probably a book and a style of investing that will appeal to you.

The best thing about this book is that essentially presents a self-contained, one-volume source for a strategy of big picture investing. Chapters include "The Myth of Buy and Hold," "Putting Together a Winning Portfolio," "Income Investing," and sections about market timing (which is generally interspersed throughout the book), and exchange traded funds (for a terrific introduction to ETF's, check out Gerald Appel's son Martin Appel's book Investing with Exchange-Traded Funds Made Easy).

For a nice contrast, read this book along with the new edition of Burton Malkiel's A Random Walk Down Wall Street, as the books seem to contradict each other on nearly every single point. Appel believes that market timing and the study of charts and historical returns hold the key to the bright elusive butterfly of market-beating returns (also know as Alpha, in the parlance). Gerald Appel and Burton Malkiel are two of the most articulate spokesmen for these two radically different schools of thought. A televised debate would be one of the most fascinating television specials of the year (to me anyway...perhaps not so much for the Desperate Housewives crowd).