Customer Reviews

High-Flying Adventures in the Stock Market

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

 

 

Well written and entertaining. Shows you what frigging joke the mutual fund industry is. A great companion book to Monkey Business: Swinging Through the Wall Street Jungle (a somewhat more shocking look at Wall Street's seedy underbelly). Hopefully Ms. Baker will have more to write later.

Through creative analogies and playful stories, Baker has a wonderful way of depicting the science and art of what these bizarre animals called 'mutual funds' are all about. She did a wonderful job of keeping me awake at night engaged in the fortunes of the Delaware funds.

Alongside the story about Delware, the book is littered with a virtual dictionary of important, and often overlooked, investment terms and situations. Baker uses creative analogies that make the most complicated situations evident to novices. She clearly knows her stuff well enough to be a professor!

All in all, a really fun read and a book that truly covers it all.

As a reader who is just getting interested in investing, I found Ms. Baker's book very useful. Unlike many other books where you need to be familiar with technical terms and financial markets in order to benefit, this book is written for the novice investor. It is not meant to be a textbook. In Ms. Baker's words, she "wishes to give the reading and investing public a flavor for what their dollars in mutual funds do all day." In that she succeeds. I discovered that I really didn't understand some terms which I thought I had, and my understanding of others was greatly enhanced. For those of us not yet ready for (or interested in) deep, technical, financial reading, this book provides a very entertaining introduction to the field and the analogies the author uses are very helpful. It whetted my appetite to learn more.

The good news - with a little bit of luck we might do as well as a mutual fund manager; the bad news - with a little bit of luck we might do as well as a mutual fund manager who we're paying to manage our money for us!

Author Molly Baker follows a top-performing mutual team around for a year, and shows you how they did it during the final six months. She gives you diary-like details as the time unfolds. That's the book.

The essence of their edge is that they bought Internet IPOs and stocks much more aggressively than other, similar funds at a time when the Internet was a red-hot investment area. That's the "run with the bulls" part of the story. That's a reference by me to the concept that when the market is hot, you should get into the hottest part of the market (better known as momentum investing). If you take a more conservative approach, you don't make the big bucks. A major part of the year's big gains versus other funds comes in the last few minutes of the last trading day of 1998 as AOL surges following its addition to the S&P 500 Index. But how the team does it is very repetitive and boring, even though they go through a gut-wrenching drop as Russian bond failures collapse the stock market and Long Term Capital has to be rescued by the Fed. That's the "watching the paint dry" part of the story.

This is a very challenging book to review accurately. The book has many fine qualities. Its best feature is that Molly Baker is terrific for finding everyday analogies for explaining basic stock market concepts. The priciness of P/E ratios is compared to women's shoes at different price levels, for example. So, if you know nothing about stocks, this book is actually a better source of explanations through analogies than any other book about investing I have ever read. However, if you know about stocks, her analogies just waste time and bulk up the book.

The day-to-day activities of the investment managers are about as interesting as watching someone do their laundry. They pretty much do the same things, over . . . and over . . . and over.

Rather than a diary-type recitation of many days, this would have been much more interesting if grouped into subject matters. That would have missed the "excitement" of the gains and losses during the year, but I doubt if too many people really care how a bunch of rich investment managers handle the stress of whether they get their three million plus for the year. I never found myself rooting for or against them.

Unless you really want to know a lot about how mutual fund managers manage your money, you will probably not find this book very interesting. And naturally, your own managers probably do it differently.

My firm does interviews with such institutional money managers every day, and we find that these people have many interesting ideas and insights. Somehow, very few of those ideas and insights made it into this book. That's a missed opportunity, for which I graded the book down one star.

On the other hand, if you know nothing about the market, and want to find out how a group of winners did it one time, you will probably love this book. For you, it is a five star book!

What a waste of time. This book is so boring and monotonous. If I read one more time, how Jerry Frey used his "20 years of experience to make the decision" - I will hurl. Where is the insight? Where is the original thinking? How about some depth? Please save your money.

I really wanted to love this book and have been trying to figure out why I didn't; why I wanted to fling it into a pit of fire. Content-wise it told me all about Jerry to the nth degree. In a trite, trivial voice! Oh, it could have been a contender. It could have been wonderful because the follow-a-manager-for-a-year angle is cool. But the problem is Ms. Baker doesn't know how to tell an exciting story, a story with moments and dialogue and emotion. Instead, she transcribes facts! The pacing is turtle-slow, and the writer tries far too hard to be clever by saying things with icky cliches and similies. I wanted to take a pen and edit. I'm sorry to sound harsh that's not my intention because I really think it's not all the author's fault. The editors were asleep. Needs more white space and more pronouns instead of "Jerry this" and "Jerry that." Nothing fresh, not even a bit twisted. Sigh. What was it about again?

Author Molly Baker follows a top-performing mutual team around for a year, and shows you how they did it during the final six months. She gives you diary-like details as the time unfolds. That's the book.

The essence of their edge is that they bought Internet IPOs and stocks much more aggressively than other, similar funds at a time when the Internet was a red-hot investment area. That's the "run with the bulls" part of the story. That's a reference by me to the concept that when the market is hot, you should get into the hottest part of the market (better known as momentum investing). If you take a more conservative approach, you don't make the big bucks. A major part of the year's big gains versus other funds comes in the last few minutes of the last trading day of 1998 as AOL surges following its addition to the S&P 500 Index. But how the team does it is very repetitive and boring, even though they go through a gut-wrenching drop as Russian bond failures collapse the stock market and Long Term Capital has to be rescued by the Fed. That's the "watching the paint dry" part of the story.

This is a very challenging book to review accurately. The book has many fine qualities. Its best feature is that Molly Baker is terrific for finding everyday analogies for explaining basic stock market concepts. The priciness of P/E ratios is compared to women's shoes at different price levels, for example. So, if you know nothing about stocks, this book is actually a better source of explanations through analogies than any other book about investing I have ever read. However, if you know about stocks, her analogies just waste time and bulk up the book.

The day-to-day activities of the investment managers are about as interesting as watching someone do their laundry. They pretty much do the same things, over . . . and over . . . and over.

Rather than a diary-type recitation of many days, this would have been much more interesting if grouped into subject matters. That would have missed the "excitement" of the gains and losses during the year, but I doubt if too many people really care how a bunch of rich investment managers handle the stress of whether they get their three million plus for the year. I never found myself rooting for or against them.

Unless you really want to know a lot about how mutual fund managers manage your money, you will probably not find this book very interesting. And naturally, your own managers probably do it differently.

My firm does interviews with such institutional money managers every day, and we find that these people have many interesting ideas and insights. Somehow, very few of those ideas and insights made it into this book. That's a missed opportunity, for which I graded the book down one star.

On the other hand, if you know nothing about the market, and want to find out how a group of winners did it one time, you will probably love this book. For you, it is a five star book!

I found this book in an airport bookstore and hoped it would make for an entertaining flight home... bad move. This book has all the elements for a truly fun read but as previous reviewers have stated is simply lacking in the execution. As a market watcher for 15 years I assumed that following a fund manager around during one of the most fascinating years in market history would translate well. But the book gives virtually no information about how industry professionals viewed these events, or even a nugget or two of new information or perception. Instead we hear streams of one-sided phone conversations and crib notes of market banter that are unintelligible even if you fully understand the jargon. If you are looking for an entertaining book about the stock market, look elsewhere. If you are considering a career in money management and want to understand the day to day drudgery, this may be useful.

The idea for this book is intriguing: follow a mutual fund manager around every day for a year and see what he does. The book takes place during one of the most volatile and hair-raising periods in recent stock market history (1998).

Unfortunately, the author of this book seems to have turned on her tape recorder and left the room for the year, returning only to transcribe her notes. The events in the text unfold utterly bereft of any real context. There is little sense of time or place and often no understanding of why decisions are made. Astonishingly, during a period known as the "Asian meltdown" the word "Asian" is mentioned only in connection with a restaurant! The writing is wooden and full of hollow metaphors. There's no research, no insight, and no reason to read this book.

What the book does accomplish (and this is by no means intentional) is to portray how generally useless fund managers are since 80% of the time they can't beat the market indexes. The book thus makes a great case to invent in index funds, such as those offered by Vanguard, which simply buy the whole index and don't bother churning stocks, spending money on reports, and paying people like the ones described in this turgid, lifeless book.

...I have to admit that I was quite disappointed. This book issuch a banausic tripe that I couldn't even finish it. If yourbackground is not in finance or if you have no clue as to what Portfolio Managers do, you will find this book somewhat interesting, but if you are like me, and you know a little bit about the stock market, you'll be truly disappointed. The story doesn't have a high, it doesn't get to a climax whatsoever. The story goes on to describe the daily life of an unknown Portfolio Manager. And it does just that. Each chapter starts with "It's monday.....". As for style is concerned, I'm just coming off reading "The Tortilla Curtain" from Tom Boyle and let me tell you, Molly Baker is no match. The words are uninspired, boring just like the story. It seems that Molly Baker has a technical writing background and it shows in the book. Nice try though!