Customer Reviews

Market Volatility

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

 

 

I am a futures trader/ stock investor/ produce distributor. My constant involvement in markets of one kind or another led me to develop a deep desire to understand volatility. Unfortunately the only books I could find dealt with option volatility. "Market Volatility" has been THE best book dealing with market mechanics that I have ever read. I recommend the book as a "must have" to my friends in the industry.

There are some long reviews on the book by professionals that I can't match in content. However for readers interested in this book because of previous reading of 'irrational exuberance' or even 'the new financial order', be warned! It is a pretty technical book with lot's of statistics. Without basic knowledge of all the R's and covariances a lot of the true value gets lost. Still Robert Shiller is a clear thinker and even without a good grasp of teh statistics it still contains interesting observations.

I give this book 4/5 stars despite the fact that it appears to deserve full credit because a) I'm not smart enough to fully understand Shiller's work, and b) the average book should earn around 3 stars. By recognizing my own lack of understanding, I admit that portions of Shiller's analysis which appear to be both interesting and correct, could in fact be wrong or misleading and therefore less deserving of stars. My lack of understanding creates volatility in my rating ability. By averaging my belief that this book is worth 5 stars with the long-run average review of 3 stars, I should reduce the expected error and volatility in my book reviews.

The book is very interesting if you like this sort of thing, but it's also a very challenging read. My background in finance is stronger than my background in math and statistics, so I usually had to read the book with wikipedia nearby to reference math terms. Even with wikipedia, the equations got too hairy for me to follow with less than 100% concentration. I found myself flipping back pages almost as often as I moved forward, and there were parts I had to just skip over. If you read this book be ready for a serious challenge. Caveat emptor.

[...]

Shiller does to the Effecient Market Theory what Columbus did to the flat earth theory. This is one of the finest books on markets I have read, and I have read hundreds.

This book is not for every investor, since the contents are very theoritical and complicated. Unfortunately, even the book full of statistic/mathematic equation, the conclusion is little.

It is a nice book.But for me,I love Shleifer's "Inefficient market" more.This book focus on the Divident-to-price ratio and use it for the analysis of the market volatility.The writer does give us some insight about the market.But I doubt if it could stand for a long... since the market is changing all the time.