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Bubbleology: The New Science of Stock Market Winners and Losers
 
 
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Bubbleology: The New Science of Stock Market Winners and Losers [Hardcover]

Kevin Hassett (Author)
3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)


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Book Description

Crown Business Briefings July 23, 2002
There are only two types of stocks: those safe from bubbles and those that are not. This is a fact of investing many discovered as they saw their fabulous gains whittled away by the extreme calamity of the Internet sector.

But what about the future? Is there a way for investors to capture the enormous potential for profit that exists at the frontier of the economy, the place where innovation and genius operate, without placing their fortunes in jeopardy? Is there a way to evaluate price increases—and declines—and identify whether they are happening for good or bad reasons?

Bubbleology makes it possible to separate the winners from the losers. It is a brilliant, practical, and original analysis of the stock market that bashes the conventional wisdom about bubbles, showing that such famous examples as Tulipomania were not, in fact, bubbles at all.

Bubbleology shows that the traditional way of evaluating risk—equating it with volatility—is inherently flawed and incomplete. If a stock fluctuates a lot in price it is regarded as risky. If the price is stable, then it is not. What this simplistic way of thinking leaves out is the simple fact that companies trying something completely new that may fundamentally alter the economic landscape are operating at the frontier. The stock of such a company swims in a sea of ambiguity, its circumstances uncertain, since there is little to provide guidance about the future. But when nobody knows for sure what will happen, pundits tell us again about Tulipomania, the South Seas Bubble, and now the debacle of the Internet to scare investors away from potentially enormous profits. To realize those profits, however, investors have to understand the role that uncertainty and ambiguity—the absence of reliable information about future events—play in the modern stock market. Those who equate ambiguity with bubbles will miss the great opportunities of the future.

Bubbleology provides a new way to observe what is really going on in the market, enabling you to understand whether a stock or a sector is suspicious—whether it is in a bubble and therefore something to be avoided. Finding bubbles requires knowing where to look and what to look for.

Bubbleology will help you avoid both streaming into speculative manias and shying away from perfectly good business opportunities. It tells you why you need to avoid both pontificating pundits and overconfident stock analysts. With this unique and forward-thinking book, you can inspect suspicious stocks, accurately discern risk, and diagnose a blossoming bubble before it vanishes along with your money.

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Editorial Reviews

From The New Yorker

In the wake of the Nasdaq's precipitate decline, investors who were once boundlessly exuberant are now hopelessly downcast, convinced that the market is doomed to an endless series of boom-and-bust cycles. Adroitly synthesizing work from the fields of economics, evolutionary psychology, and social science, Hassett shows that the kind of frenzy we saw at the height of dot-com mania, far from being characteristic of financial markets, is actually relatively rare. A bubble, he argues, is almost always the product of technological upheaval, which creates great economic potential but also great economic uncertainty. Investors looking for guidance take their cue from each other, encouraging a herd mentality, and individually rational behavior creates a collectively irrational outcome. Still, for all the havoc that bubbles can wreak on our portfolios, they can also provide collective gains: the railroad bubble gave America its first transportation network, and we will be reaping the technological benefits of the Internet boom for decades to come.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

Review

“Financial bubbles are serious business. But in the hands of Kevin Hassett, they’re also a blast. His Bubbleology is as enlightening as it is fun to read.”—Jeffrey H. Birnbaum, Washington, D.C., bureau chief of Fortune magazine and contributor to Fox News Channel

Product Details

  • Hardcover: 187 pages
  • Publisher: Crown Business; 1 edition (July 23, 2002)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0609609297
  • ISBN-13: 978-0609609293
  • Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.5 x 0.8 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces
  • Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #928,701 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

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Average Customer Review
3.6 out of 5 stars (5 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars A, August 3, 2002
By A Customer
This review is from: Bubbleology: The New Science of Stock Market Winners and Losers (Hardcover)
Despite Mr. Hassett's track record with his previous book "Dow 36,000," I saw him appear on CNBC during the early morning show and thought that he did well enough that I should buy the book. He promised that you could use his book to figure out what stocks were overvalued and which ones weren't. A pretty important topic given the current market environment. However, after reading this short book I have no idea of how to actually rank stocks on the 1 to 6 scale that he uses. He doesn't actually provide concrete examples, only that he says that he put together this ranking and it worked really well. My other problem is that if this approach works so well how come he didn't use it when his "Dow 36,000" book came out when the stock market was at its peak. Some explanation would have been useful for why Hassett, who is marketing this book as a full proof approach to spotting bubbles, wasn't able to use this approach himself over just the last couple of years to warn people and predict which stocks were going to crash, a period when he was supposedly writing this book. Claiming that you use a not clearly stated formula to identify overvalued stocks after they have already crashed seems like a scam to me.
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8 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Incredibly Fun Read, August 25, 2002
By A Customer
This review is from: Bubbleology: The New Science of Stock Market Winners and Losers (Hardcover)
I saw a favorable review in the New Yorker so I took the plunge and bought the book, even though I never read finance books. This is one of the most interesting books I have ever read. While its easy to say there was a bubble after the fact, this book looks at the work of the real scientists who have been searching for hard scientific evidence of bubbles. The book has very well done dialogues that help make the material entertaining. I never expected that the search for bubbles would provide so much insight into how the world works.
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3 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Ellsbergian ambiguity(Keynesian uncertainty)leads to Bubbles, November 24, 2005
By 
Michael Emmett Brady "mandmbrady" (Bellflower, California ,United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   
This review is from: Bubbleology: The New Science of Stock Market Winners and Losers (Hardcover)
Hassett has improved his scholarship immensely in the present book over his previous,co-authored book with James Glassman ,written in 1999, which predicted a Dow of 35,000 by late 2005.The fundamental problem underlying the formation of a boom-bust stock market(herd,crowd, and momentum investing,financed in large part by margin account loans,that leads to manias,bubbles,panics,crashes and subsequent economic downturns)is the inherent ambiguity(uncertainty) of the information or data upon which stock market participants are basing their expectations and probabilistic forecasts of future price changes.The inability to form reliable probabilistic forecasts of future market outcomes leads perfectly rational decision makers to start to follow other market participants who they think might be somewhat better informed.The formation of herd behavior is then started and you are well down the road to boom and bust capitalism.Hassett correctly credits D.Ellsberg,F.Knight,and J.M.Keynes for providing the fundamental concepts underlying his "new" "science" of stock market analysis.Essentially,any type of classical-neoclassical analysis based on the assumption of normality(a normal probability distribution a la the efficient markets type of reasoning) is shown to be badly misleading and very inaccurate.The ambiguity(uncertainty)versus risk distinction is of fundamental importance for any type of financial investing or modeling.There are two significant omissions in Hassett's book.The first omission is Ellsberg's 1962 dissertation,recently published in 2001.Hassett gives Gilboa and Schmeidler unwarranted credit for incorporating optimism-pessimism into Ellsberg's decision theoretic technical structure.Ellsberg had already integrated a generalization of the Hurwicz optimism-pessimism index into his general model of decision making under ambiguity in the very important chapter 7 of his dissertation.Gilboa and Schmeidler, unfortunately,conflate the existence of ambiguity with optimism and pessimism.Supposedly,optimists are ambiguity preferrers and pessimists are ambiguity averse.Decision making that is conservative in nature,i.e.,careful,prudent,circumspect,that "does not rush in where angels fear to tread",also appears to be mislabeled as "pessimism".Ellsberg makes it completely clear that his rho index is separate from his optimism-pessimism index.Likewise,conservatism in decision making is not the same as pessimism in decision making under conditions of ambiguity.Gilboa and Schmeidler deserve some credit for applying a more advanced mathematical technique[Choquet integration using capacities(convex-concave),a generalization of mathematical probability functions that allow non additivity (sub and super additive capacities) to be incorporated using ranked data].However,they have made no theoretical or empirical advance over Ellsberg's chapter 7 presentation .The purely mathematical advance made by Gilboa and Schmeidler appears to have been overemphasized in the economics journal literature.Gilboa and Schmeidler need to straighten out their analysis so as to separate ambiguity from optimism-pessimism and distinguish conservatism from pessimism. The second major oversite made by Hassett is that none of the 50 years of work done by Benoit Mandelbrot on analyzing stock and financial market pricing data is referenced.Mandelbrot's mild risk(normal distribution-random walk-efficient markets-independence-continuity)versus wild risk(Cauchy distribution-discontinuities-long and short run dependence-correlated variances)distinction is of great importance theoretically and empirically.Mandelbrot has established empirically the unstable, boom -bust nature of capitalism.The markets are far,far more risky than is assumed by the economics establishment.An overwhelming case can be made that the work of Ellsberg and Mandelbrot is so important that they should receive the Nobel prize in economics in 2006.
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Inside This Book (learn more)
First Sentence:
There are many questions that vex people who study the economy and financial markets. Read the first page
Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
search for bubbles, rational price, bubbles exist, equity premium puzzle
Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
General Motors, New York Times, Wall Street, Robert Shiller, United States, Adams Express, Declaration of Independence, Stephen Hawking, University of Chicago, Very Small Fish Incorporated
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