Customer Reviews

The Complete Arbitrage Deskbook

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Reverre has written a very comprehensive book, covering all instruments. Quite importantly, he has gone beyond conventional merger arbitrage for the equity markets, and details both fundamentally based equity arbitrage techniques and statistical arbitrage, based on return correlations. The optimal audience is probably financial institutions with a speculative timeframe of a few days and upwards. The outlined methodologies do not include intraday arbitrage; however, the astute trader could probably modify the interday strategies to the intraday trading horizon, by constantly monitoring evolving bid and ask spread differentials at the microscopic level, rather than monitoring conventional interday spreads (without placing too much, if any, emphasis on bid-ask differentials).

For the private trader, the book does provide some food for thought; however, unless a private trader has access to cutting edge technology and the appropriate price feeds, he will not be able to effectively execute too many of the posited strategies.

I bought this book in order to improve my knowledge on arbitrage. I was expecting to find some practical applications on the market like on (equity) pairs trading, yield curve arbitrage. The book provides a very broad and general overview on the concept of arbitrage and it is a very good book for someone who wants to understand the meaning of arbitrage and how and where he can do it. If you already know what arbitrage is, you dont need to read it.

The Arbitrage Deskbook is thorough guide to arbitrage trading strategies. It is extremely comprehensive, covering arbitrage in all markets - from equities, to bonds, to commodity futures, and more. Most important is that it gets the reader to think like an arbitrageur and recognize the arbitrage opportunities presented by different situations.

This book is so comprehensive, that it does sacrifice some depth for breadth. Many complicated math problems are glossed over; it is difficult to understand some concepts thoroughly because the examples are not explained to great detail. If you see an important section, I suggest rereading it several times for better understanding.

In general, the author seems to expect the reader to have intermediate to advanced academic knowledge of finance. Familiarity with financial math and formulas will make this book easier to read. I suggest having some introductory college-level finance courses before reading, because the formulas presented may seem very cryptic if you've never seen them before reading this book.

In general, I think this is a great tool as a reference and for getting familiar with arbitrage. Don't expect to know everything by reading through it one time - there is too much information to remember on a single pass. Rather, try using this to learn how an arbitrageur seeks opportunity and then reference the topics later as you need them (i.e. keep this deskbook on your desk!). This is a great read for any student interested in entering proprietary trading or hedge funds.

This is a broad introduction into equity arbitrage world, but not much depth is provided. There is a better book on risk arb by Moore. I am still looking for a "real" book on statistical arb.

This book is a good introduction for those not familiar with arbitrage. However, the author tries to encompass every topic related to arbitrage which leads to loss of depth and focus. The big problem with this book is its misleading title, as it creates the impression that the book presents an in-depth and systematic review of arbitrage. If the title were "An Introduction to Arbitrage", everyone would be happy with it, since such a title would give a precise information about the book's content.

The contents of this book fluctuate from the interesting and informative, to the staggeringly useless. The three sections of the book are as follows: 1) A general overview of various types of arbitrage which is quite good, but is punctuated with mundane irrelevancies about trade settlements and technical calculations of risk and return factors. 2) A section of algebraic masturbation intended to imply that you can actually quantify risk in an arbitrage portfolio. 3) Some examples of real-world arbitrage situations that are generally instructive, but not comprehensive enough. Overall I think this book was a good attempt, but is much more suited to a dry finance course than real-world application. Unfortunately, a better text probably does not exist.

This book can be seen as consisting of 2 parts:

1) Arb basics which "everyone knows" (assuming you have a serious interest in the field). These include description of financial instruments, their pricing and valuation, arb strategies, etc. This information is available from many other sources.

2) Author's commentary on these instruments and strategies (drawing from hands-on arb experience). This is the real value of this book. The author's writing is clear and witty. I really enjoyed it. This is certainly not a book for "dry finance course" as one reviewer noted. Given the subject matter (very abstract and dry in itself) the book is a suprisingly good read. Also, this is a real-life book written by a real-life practitioner. It provides you with many useful insights into the financial markets.

A great supplement to the advanced course in finance.

This was a dense book, not really the easiest to read, but was full of good information. For those looking for an introduction to equity arbitrage, just read the first section. Supposedly it's focused on equity arbitrage, but there's a lot of information about fixed income, which is interesting to know but really should have been edited out and put into a totally other book.

It's a pretty technical book, so if you don't have a background in the concepts involved, don't start with this book. There are a lot of equations in this book, and terminology that's not defined. (To be fair, Ms. Reverre's introduction states that she's directing the book to a junior trader, so it's fair for her to assume that the reader has already been through the introductary books.) I would rather these have been left out... from what I could tell, the equations are just enough to give you a flavor without enough to actually be usable.

Overall, definitely an informative book, and one to read and keep nearby for reference.

As a professional in the ETF business I highly recommend this book. The math is a little tough at points (makes me wish I studied with more conviction) but well worth the time it takes to assess. As a desk top reference book it's a must have. Some of the subject matter is for the hardcore Quant however, that's what makes it appealing to read and consequently study.

Got my brother ERNITO this book and he's been arbitragging all over the place!! Great!