Customer Reviews

Option Pricing: Black-Scholes Made Easy (Wiley Trading)

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

 

 

Any student or trainee having to study this topic really should buy this tutorial.

Having a degree in Mathematics and a professional accountancy qualification did not prepare me for the explanations of Black Scholes to be found in most text books.

They may have got a Nobel prize for their option pricing model but Black and Scholes were never going to get an award for clarity of explanation.

Having grappled with this area for a few months, I decided I needed a little more innovative help; hence my purchase of Jerry Marlow's interactive tutorial.

Two days later and I feel I could go for the next Nobel prize myself!

So many things click into place so quickly, it's marvellous.

Jerry gives his email address which I had to resort to for one query. He answered most helpfully within a couple of hours.

I suspect that it helps to have had an overview appreciation of the area before starting the tutorial but this shouldn't deter first timers from starting with this.

I was skeptical to buy it since there were more than 100 different books available on options... but I am glad I choose this book. Its easy and the software developed beats anything I have seen yet... All the free softwares available are excel based but do not offer such insight on the subject as this book.
I would strongly recommend it to anyone. Only hitch is that the software is bit slow to run but it performs...

From the beginning pages, the explanations are flowing and account for all levels of competency in options, the stock market and the computer skills needed to follow the animations. When you finish the very readable book, you will no longer need to depend on others for advice; you become your own advisor. The animations are excellent while the mathematical concepts are carefully explained. I now have confidence in my knowledge and my decisions. Hats off to Mr. Marlow!

Fantastic software!

The book is really a step by step tutorial on how to use the
probability forecasting software that is on the CD.

Excellent learning tool as well as a decision-analysis tool for investments.

Really great. Loved it. Learned a lot!

Many thanks to the author.

One Caution: It doesn't work on a Macintosh
(unless you have PC emulation software for your Mac).

Cheers,
---Freddy

The visual presentation the book offers combined with the interactive CD-ROM make this indispensable to anyone who really wants to understand how option pricing works. It's right here on my desk for easy and quick reference - which is my advice to everyone!

I liked that this book was interactive in the sense that you use included software in each of the exercises and thought that the exercises did a good job of explaining the underlying concepts needed to understand option pricing theory (volatility, probability distributions, Black Scholes assumptions, etc). I did think the software itself was poorly written -- but this was partly offset by the fact that the book gives you step-by-step instructions on what to do in each exercise with the software, and if you follow the instructions it works pretty well.

That said, I recommend Hull's Options, Futures, and Other Derivatives as this is one of the leading references on the topic. This is the book that everyone in the industry refers to..

Note that I did not take the following into account when I was rating this book but I purchased the text directly from Amazon.com (not a 3rd party Amazon.com merchant) and when it arrived it was not what I was expecting. The pages were monochrome (photo-copies in black-and-white) and some of the pages were out of order. There was no CDROM included but rather a link to download a .zip off of the publisher's website.

This book makes it relatively easy to understand the mathematical principles behind the Black-Scholes theory. The CD guides you through various scenarios and plots everything for you. You don't have to be a mathematician with a PhD from the University of Chicago to appreciate the explanations and diagrams depicted. A "must-have" for every options trader or investor - a definite "keeper"!

While the subject matter of this book is challenging, I was not pleased when the book arrived and the pages were meant to be read at 90 degree angle from normal books. That, added with a tight binding made the book nearly impossible to move through. I was also not impressed with the quality of the printing inside. It was far too faded. I felt that the book did not do justice to the subject covered and I ended up returning the book and purchased another book on the subject. I am not trying to be overly critical of the book. I was very enticed by the title and cover, but the way the inside of the book was set up was not near to the quality dedicated to the cover. I think that this has the potential to be a better book if the inside is rotated to that of a normal book and the quality of printing was improved (color printing would be ideal).