Customer Reviews

The Portable MBA in Investment (The Portable MBA Series)

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When I first found this book (from the library, fortunately), I was very eager to read it. I've done a lot of investing on my own and have always wanted to learn about more sophisticated methods. This looked like a perfect read: A compendium of original essays by distinguished academics and investors in the field. While the first few chapters made sense, I found that the book became increasingly complex. This is surprising, since I have a background in statistics, investing, and have a reasonable proficiency in mathematics. The authors rarely strayed from heavily academic prose, laden with undefined financial terms (only one chapter has a glossary). The book doesn't flow at all -- it doesn't progress from simple to advanced topics. I would have rather read a book by one author.

That doesn't make this a bad book. I imagine that these authors have made some profound insights in this tome, but my definition of a good book isn't one that has genius locked up behind dense language. Until the Portable MBA series comes out with a primer, I'll be searching for books that provide richer and more thorough explanations of their subjects.

As an undergraduate, I studied political science; as a graduate student, I studied history (among other things) - however, few if any of my classes ever dealt with the actual mechanics of business, despite dealing with business in a more general sense (as it would fit in the context of history and politics). I decided that it was important to learn some of the basic concepts of business administration, and the Portable MBA series by John Wiley & Sons publishers fit the bill.

This book on investment covers topics such as investment strategy, setting objectives, valuation, risk, evaluating performance, corporate governance, and the general process of investing. The introduction looks at many of the myths of investing - author Peter Bernstein highlights many of the clichés of Wall Street, such as 'nothing ventured, nothing gained', 'buy low, sell high', and 'don't put all your eggs in one basket', in order to look at the truth or false aspects behind each one. He also states, 'If you're so smart, how come you're not rich? The answer is disarmingly simple: The essence of investment theory is that being smart is not a sufficient condition for being rich.'

This book fills in some of the gaps, but it is not a get-rich-quick guide by any means. It presents investing as an ongoing process - investment is dynamic, and pulls in many different strands and elements; investment is not 'collecting things' like stock and bonds, and the authors work to minimize the importance of artificial barriers such as foreign vs. domestic investing, which in a global economy means less than it used to.

The authors who contributed to this volume have both academic and professional experience, and tend to do a good job at explaining things in terms that the non-professional can understanding. Anyone with a basic undergraduate background should find this volume accessible. Because investing deals with numbers, there is a fair amount of math in some of the sections. An understanding of graphs, charts, and simple equations will be useful.

This is not really a how-to guide for investing; for one thing, such guides generally need to be updated more frequently. However, as a guide to general understanding of the system of investment and finance in the modern Western economic system, this is a good survey and reference.

Although the book was edited in 1995, many of the topics are very relevant to today's investor.

Managing Risk, valuation, investment strategy are among the pertinent topics that you can learn alot from.

It is however, complex and you do need to understand the basics of economics and finance to fully take advantage of the concepts and topics discussed.