Customer Reviews

Using Economic Indicators to Improve Investment Analysis, Third Edition

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

 

 

Anticipating a number of delays while traveling over the holidays recently, I picked up a few books from Amazon.com; one I never put down.

Dr. Evelina Tainer has managed, in a succinct manner, to offer academicians (particularly those without practical experience in the world of finance)a way to communicate ideas to students that is compelling and interesting.

I more carefully read about her background only after finishing her book. It make perfect sense that this book was written by an author who has worked in both academic and professional circles. Dr. Tainer integrates material from both perspectives in a meaningful way.

I was particularly fond of the "Did you know" sections where Dr. Tainer fine-tunes a specific notion or concept.

Her discussion of "Seasonal Adjustment" helped to clarify a nubmer of questions that once clouded my understanding.

Academic texts rarely allocate space (for obvious reasons) to details regarding economic indicators. This is where Dr. Tainer's book picks up to bring to light the relevance of the indicators to investment analysis.

I can readily see how Dr. Tainer's, "Using Economic Indicators to Improve Investment Analysis," would be a welcome text in the classroom -- as a stand alone text for an elective course or as supplement to other required texts. I think that students will take to its lucid approach.

This is not only an excellent reference source, but also a very interesting book. People who are not experts in the fields of economics or finance will have no problem grasping the concepts. I keep it in the office for reference and from time to time pick it up to read up on different topics. I've been impressed with Tainer's ability to make these concepts so easy to understand. Her "Did you know? and Market Reaction" sections are also very interesting and provide an inside view as to how government policymakers and financial marketmakers shape the economy in ways that are very relevant to the average consumer. I recommend this book to anyone who is looking for a good reference book or wants to complement his studies in this field. I think that college students can benefit a great deal from it. For those of you who watch CNBC or CNNfn constantly, you stand to benefit the most from a book like this as it will not only teach you the cause and effect of important economic indicators that are put on the screen on a daily basis, but what's more important, the reasons why they impact the economy and the markets the way they do.

From my point of view, this book consists of three parts. Part one, that is, Chapters 1-6, devoted to national accounts and their indicators. Part two, that is, Chapters 7-9, devoted to inflation and inflation related labor and production indicators, and finally part three, Chapters 10-11, is devoted to the central bank and treasury systems. The investment analysis part of this book seems to be the market reaction parts mentioned at the end of each section. Yet they seem to me a little too simplistic for the real world. In the real world, we mostly observe growth cycles rather than business cycles. In other words, business cycle recessions rather than growth cycle recessions are depicted in market reaction parts in this book. Nevertheless this is a good streetwise ECON 101 book. As a final note; although not updated, its second edition seems to me better.

This is a good book on how the different sectors of the economy affect the overal economy and how they move relative to the business cycle. The book explains how these sectors affect the business cycle and how they can be used to assess the state of the economy and forcast the different stages of the business cycle.

The book can be a very good complement for a textbook on macroeconomics or business cycles. It is much more practical than most macroeconomics books.

The book describes many important economic indicators and how markets react to each one of them.

However, the book does not put these economic indicators (and the dynamics of the different sectors) into a framework or a plan that the investor can use to make investment decisions. The last chapter of the book makes an attempt at doing that, but, in my opinion, it is not enough.

I also recommend "The Investor's Guide to Active Asset Allocation" by Martin Pring which does a great job in explaining the business cycle and how to factor it into your investment decisions.

This book might be a good compliment to an existing library, but I didn't find it very useful myself. I thought the comment of an earlier review's title, 'A Perfect Complement to an academic finance text!' fairly accurate. If you want to know what the talking heads on the financial news are touting, this is an excellent guide.

In other words, if you have bought into the conventional econometrics of the day, whatever that is, this is your guidebook. It ought to help get through a class, but outside the ivory tower, I'm not sure it will be much help.

Personally, the author didn't help me connect the dots. What do these indicators imply for the GNP 2, 3 or 4 years down the road? What connections do foreign indicators have with domestic ones?

These questions are not answered. It's just a dictionary. You get the nominal description, the publishing authority, a bit about why the authority thinks their indicator useful and maybe a few sample numbers. That is it. If you like academic economics or ever have to make a presentation to some government officials, this is probably an exceptional service, though.

This was the required text for my MBA level class on investments. The book is very well organized and extremely lucid. The book covers a very wide gamut of concepts related to investments. Most MBA classes focus of financial markets whereas traditional economics programts are very theoretical. MBA classes typically do not cover the working of the Fed and the factors that go into interest rate determination; even the class on Money and Banking mostly focusses on the administrative and theoretical aspects of money. This book is unique as it covers not only how the FOMC makes decisions, but also explains the various indices that typical MBA programs fail to cover. A very rigorous book at a great price. I learnt a lot from this book.

If you are used to read more technical and professional books, this book will be a disappointment. The writting style is too sloppy. The author has an annoying habit of citing so-on-so said this and that - it's not the standard way of making references in a typical academic manner. There is also too much repetition. The author basically says that whenever an economic indicator suggests a stronger economy, it'd be negative for the bond market and positive for the equity market, which is fine, but she keeps repeating the same thing over and over again. There isn't much insight in it.