Customer Reviews

The Complete Guide to Capital Markets for Quantitative Professionals (McGraw-Hill Library of Investment and Finance)

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

It is crucial to the success of a technologist on Wall Street to have a fluent understanding of the traders they support: More focused feature sets are developed, faster communication with traders (they have about a 2-second attention span) and correct assumptions are made.

Unfortunately, working in technology tends to isolate oneself from the trading floor. This is not necessary. Although, there are plenty of classics out there (read Fabozzi), they don't target the technologist who hasn't grown up on the trading floor. They still don't answer the questions, "Why would you do that", "What's the purpose", "What's driving everything"

This book turns the whole model upside down. The author goes into a very detailed and interesting history of the markets first. Then goes into the main areas any financial group handles: Treasuries, Futures, Interest Rate, Agencies, Options, Corporates (We won't mention mortgage).

After reading just the Treasuries and Futures section, I IMMEDIATELY saw a difference in my ability to communicate with the desk. I was able to suggest alternative approaches concerning enhancements and features, understand when problems arose, plus I actually understood EVERYTHING the trader said.

If you work in technology, be it QA, Software Development or even technology management, this is a must read.

Best of all, it's a great read. I found myself looking forward to reading the book every single day.

Enjoy

Rarely a book with a title as ambitious as "Complete Guide" fulfills its promise. This book does. Big time.
It is written for quantitative professionals (current and prospective) and gives a bird-view account of all types of activities available to them in a typical Wall Street firm.
The author cleverly avoids pitfalls of the books of this genre. The book is general enough to cover various settings, but not too general to become useless. It is detailed enough to provide relevant information, but not too detailed to become a software manual or a textbook.
The text educates without being annoying and entertains without being lightweight.
Hopefully, readers will appreciate consistency and appropriateness of the book's style. The author avoids over-fragmentation and "bulletization": the book consists of 20 chapters without any further subdivisions. It makes for much smoother reading undistracted by unnecessary subheadings.
After finishing the book one can only marvel at the author's efficiency, wondering how he could cram so much useful and interesting information in just 600 pages.

Highly recommended.

If you are involved with the capital markets and investment banking world on the technology side, you really need to read this book. Don't let the title scare you. The author does a very good job of pointing out how the capital markets business works and how technology is a major influence to to the sucess of this capital markets business. This title should be a must read for all MBAs.

I got a job as quantitative risk analyst in a hedge fund 6 month ago. what has frustrated me is that I don't know how the market works. I have both John Hull and Paul Wilmot's books. They are good books but don't show you how to savvy the market. I bought this book 2 weeks ago and is half way from the end. I have to say, I wish I had read this book before I started this job. Evennow, it's not late. It helps so much that I have convinced my boss that I can read it over the work time so my productivity will be greatly improved. I absolutely love reading it.

This book offers a detailed overview of capital markets by each product category starting with history and moving towards market and technology changes. The final chapters concentrate more on market data, problems and role of technology division within the companies.
As a technology professional with fixed income experience, I found this book making a decent attempt to explain various products, trading jargon and how technology is changing the nature of markets. However, I did not find this book helpful in explaining the roles and responbilities of quantitative professionals.

This is an excellent book for anybody interested in technology on Wall Street. There is a lot of information, but it is presented in an easy to absorb format and would be an interesting read even for those with no inclination to work in the area.

I work in as a quant in a major investment back and I learned a lot from reading the book. I am almost concerned that people can do really well in interviews from just reading the book. It covers all the questions that I have asked applicants to check whether they actually know something about the stuff on their resumes!

I have convinced my boss that this should be mandatory reading for all developers in my group and the firm has actually ordered some copies for that purpose.

This is a great book if you are a technical person who is trying to understand how Wall Street works. It gives you an overview of who the players are, what the different products mean (i.e. Equities, Bonds, Options, etc), as well as the computer systems that make it all work. The book is well written, and despite covering so much ground, explains concepts very well.

It is written with a smart person in mind, so it goes through concepts fairly quickly, yet gives you a good flavor of the topics, which is great for an overview such as this.

The book really gives you an idea of where your technical skills can be applied on Wall Street, and what kind of work you would be doing.

As an IT consultant who worked at a few Wall Street firms, this gave me a much better understanding of what I was working on and why it was useful to the business.

Good book on capital markets if you are a newer in the field. It explains pretty well the business of bonds, markets, stocks, etc in an easy way, with few mathematical formulation. He also talks about the people in the industry, and how they interact.

A pair of chapters seemed to me a bit poor, but it's globally a good book to understand how the whole capital markets works.

Not good for incumbents in the field.

great handbook from wall street practitioner, indepth knowledge and experience of financial market. Everytime I read it, I learn something new.

Great introduction to Wall Street and just perfect for a techie like me. On my 5th chapter.. but very interesting read..