Financial-future

This is an excellent book. Sure, every woman should read it, but it is a great fundamental financial planning resource for men, too. If you are looking for a way to get started, start here. You will learn the basics of investments, insurance, estate planning, etc. And the book gradually progresses to more complex concepts.

EVERY WOMAN NEEDS TO READ ANDEXPERIENCE WHAT EVEN THE MOST SOPHISTICATED WOMEN IGNORED...THEIR FINANCIAL HEALTH. 9 OUT OF 10 WOMEN WILL AT ONE TIME BE ALONE IN THEIR LIVES...6 OF 8 WOMEN WHOSE HUSBAND DIES NOW WILL SUFFER SEVERE FINANCIAL DISTRESS...THIS IS YOUR WAKE UP CALL...IT HAPPENED TO ME---AND THIS BOOK IS FILLED WITH HORROR STORIES OF WHAT OTHER WOMEN JUST LIKE YOU HAVE IGNORED FOR SO LONG. I HOPE YOU WILL ENJOY IT

OK, I am not a woman, so I am probably not supposed to have read this book. But I thought I would check it out. And I was pleasantly surprised.
The ladies involved in the writing of this book were involved in starting a 'Money Club' investment group. In the course of running this group, they learnt and taught about all the basics of personal finance, including (from the title headings):
* Investment Basics.
* Where To Put Your Money And Why.
* Retirement Planning.
* Buying Insurance.
* Planning Your Husband's (And Your) Estate.
* What To Do When Things Change.
Cover of the topics is fairly thorough. But, as many readers would now, the content of the majority of entry level personal finance books is all pretty standard. So, in the end it is the format and style of writing that makes a good one worth the read. Thankfully, this book is well written - relaxing and interesting to read. The inclusion of lots of personal anecdotes (especially by the members of The Money Club) makes alot of the points easier to understand and absorb. And it really drills home the importance of applying the message of the book.
All in all, a fantastic book for women, especially those 30+ worried about the state of their financial affairs. For those males (or women younger than 30), I might recommend 'The Complete Idiot's Guide to Personal Finance in Your 20s And 30s' by Sarah Young Fisher and Susan Shelly, or 'The Wealthy Barber' by David Chilton.

Melt away your fears of finances with THE MONEY CLUB. I have read a bunch of these index books about wealth, and this one is serviceable, covering most of the basics. What this book has that others don't: it reaches women on a personal level and lets us know WHY we need to start paying attention to our money and our financial futures. The ladies on the cover (members of the NYC based money club) are described just enough so that you get to almost get to know them. Interspersed throughout the text, you read about mistakes that they made before they joined the club and took back control of their lives. This personal touch made me think twice about some subjects which had made my eyes glaze over when I read about them in other books. I found the book very motivating and extraordinarily revealing. We can make a lot of mistakes in our wills and in the way we title assets: these can come back to haunt our heirs if we don't think of certain consequences. I appreciate the concrete illustrations of what can go very, very wrong! There were only a few tidbits that I did not agree with. I do not agree that a woman is helped by thinking of a diamond as a future re-sale item. On the other hand, I liked the suggestion that women who don't have their own sources of income might "ask" their husbands for a few shares of a mutual fund instead of jewelry or whatever is a fashionable marital gift these days. Whether you are a working woman or a Wife with a capital W, this book is full of eye-openers and good advice. Reading The Money Club can be a giant first step to building psychological security about your financial future.

This is a well-informed and very readable book on the informational value of the financial markets. However, this is not a how-to book on stock picking. What Mr Insana is concerned with in this book is not so much what price movements can tell us about an individual stock, but the macro information that the financial markets can tell us about the economy, geopolitics, major news events etc. There's almost no advice on individual stock picking based on price movements (too noisy), but there are advices on how to choose a job, time the purchase of a new home, move cash in and out of the market etc. based on the message of the markets.

In retrospect, some of the messages from the markets identified in the book are quite prescient. A good example is the rapid deterioration in the A/D line at the height of the Internet bubble. Of course that phenonmenon did not go unnoticed by the market pros. I clearly remember numerous analysts assuring viewers on CNBC that the stock market was not over-valued (and therefore in no danger of collapsing) because so many stocks were in the doldrums!

The book was filled with anecdotes about how major economic and geopolitical events (from Fed rate cuts to border wars between Egypt and Libya) are foreshadowed by unexplained market movements. Had Mr. Insana focused on the rationale behind these movements his argument would've been a lot more convincing. Instead, the book had a tendency to ascribe a sort of magical, oracular power to the market and the "smart money" that makes the market. Of course the real reason is a lot more mundane. Sometimes it's rampant insider trading (as in the oil futures mkt). At other times anyone who has bothered to read a newspaper would have seen it coming from a mile away. A good example is the collapse of the Thai baht. Any regular reader of the Far Eastern Economic Review would not have needed the markets to send a msg - for months the magazine was filled with dire warnings of imminent collapse in its op-ed pages.

Another issue that Mr. Insana did not address is the very important question of how to separate the signal from the noise emanating from the market 24 hours a day. As someone who had (foolishly) dabbled in the futures market, I know first hand that wild swings in the market can be triggered but nothing more dramatic than a 1/2-hr T-storm in downtown Chicago. (I always susepct that if I wait at a 2nd fl. window at the CBOT and sprinkle water on the head of a particular trader as he leaves the building, I can make a killing in soybeans.) In the days of old when the market was almost the exclusive domain of the Smart Money in the know, the msg. of the mkts was probably a lot more reliable than today, when the unwashed masses can steamroll the smart money based on the most ludicrous rumor posted on Pump-n-dump.com. How to separate the grains from the chaff is something we'll have to leave to another CNBC author.

BTW, there really is a web site called pumpanddump.com.

Those other reviewers (as well as CNBC, Amazon and financial experts) are right. SIMPLE MONEY SOLUTIONS by Nancy Lloyd (a Federal Reserve Board economist who I see frequently on CNBC and read in the New York Times Sunday Business) and this book by Ron Insana are all I needed to finally make sense of my personal finances and begin making good investment decisions for my personal portfolio as well as my 401(k) plan.

By using the outstanding, original and easy-to-follow advice in these two books my net worth has actually risen into the high six (6) figures!!! Not bad while the market is stagnating or dropping.

My friends, whose portfolios have been plunging in value, are in awe of my newfound financial savvy and skyrocketing bottom line.

And I owe it all to the information I picked up in these two incredible books. Ron and Nancy should patent this advice. It beats anything I've read elsewhere.

CNBC anchor Ron Insana's second book on the stock market, "The Message of the Markets," follows "Traders' Tales" in 1996, and does an excellent job of selling you on the idea that the market does send signals for anyone who's interested in looking for them. Using Insana's words, "Many times the prices of stocks, bonds, and commodities accurately anticipate or forecast future events. "But what is a "market?" If a market is where buyers and sellers come together and agree to exchange assets - stocks, bonds, futures, options, wheat, oil, gold, cloth, Beanie Babies, guns, drugs, etc., then the "message" of the market has to be the PRICE resulting from that exchange. That price level conveys enough information that if you know what you are looking for, you will be able to anticipate future events solely on the basis of price and its trend. Why? Because there is what Insana calls "smart money" and "dumb money."Smart money belongs to insiders, those closest to the action who see and know what is happening. They act on their knowledge, leaving their tell-tale footprints of transaction prices for all to see. Then there are the outsiders; the ones who wake up one morning and read about something that just happened, realize that it is significant, and decide to catch the obvious trend already in progress, invariably buying from those same insiders who got in months ago anticipating exactly that outcome. What Insana doesn't say is that without smart money to indicate the way, all markets would be chaotic, panic-driven price spikes in either direction as everybody tried to react to the same thing at the same time. He is particularly correct when he warns to watch out for the price move "with no apparent reason." It can signal momentous events on the horizon.The real message of the book thus becomes that if you learn to track where the "smart money" is going, then in addition to profiting along with the insiders on the various price moves, you can also make more intelligent business, investment, and career decisions. Insana uses the interest rate yield curve as well as popular averages to predict the onset of recessions; market internals (Advance/Decline Line, diverging Dow Jones Averages, etc.) to predict the stock market; and commodity price movements to predict geopolitical events.
He gives industry/sector group relative strength rotation credit for frequently predicting the economy's strengths and weaknesses and cites ways in which this can be used in selecting career paths as well as suggesting business trends. He uses commodity price moves as signals that foretell future events such as Chernobyl, the Gulf War, the Egypt-Libya potential war, and other geopolitical upheavals.  However, I believe he makes too much of the market selling off just prior to the announcement that JFK had been shot. There is a story about a certain well-known network newscaster in Dallas making the call back to his NY newsroom, then ripping the pay phone out of the wall to keep other reporters from using it to get to their newsrooms. So there may have been real reasons for the news delay. Anyway, the market was shut down with the Dow suffering only a 3% decline. After remaining closed one additional day, the market continued its upward climb for the next 3 years. While a member of the Pacific Stock Exchange, I witnessed the same momentary "front-running" when Reagan was shot on March 30, 1981. On that day something "felt" amiss when we suddenly got hit will an avalanche of sell orders. Minutes later, the news tape announced that the president had been shot. But like in the Kennedy situation, the market dipped momentarily, then continued its rally. In these two cases, the message was inconsequential, financially speaking. After giving numerous examples of what market signals are and how they've fared over the years, Insana asks his most thought-provoking question: "So why was it that most investors, all the world's politicians...failed to notice trouble signs on the horizon? Once again, it was the failure of many observers to pay attention to the market's ominous message."  The implication being that the rain clouds were forming but nobody took notice. The answer is simple yet unsatisfying: As long as we listen to what "they" say instead of watching what "they" do, we will always fall victim to "their" market. What Insana is making a case for is a market discipline termed Technical Analysis. It looks at market action, valuing above all else the constant interplay between the supply and demand for a any tradable entity, and considers Fundamental Analysis (Wall Street research) as so much hot air. It is not a particularly popular stance, but it is much closer to allying yourself with reality than anything else.

I stopped reading this book after the first 7 chapters. It's easy going conceptually, but manages to be very irritating for the following reasons: The "definitions" are often confusing and unilluminating, although the examples that follow generally manage to get the idea across. There are also a large number of mathematical errors, which I was able to clear up only because I'm already familiar with the essentials of VaR. As a first introduction, the book is therefore useless. Perhaps the remaining 10 chapters of the book are of sterling quality -- to hedge against this eventuality I award two stars, rather than just one -- but I will be seeking another source.

[And shame, shame, shame on Wiley Finance's editors. Apart from the above errors, here are just two howlers that prove that the book was published before anybody read it: "Neper's number" for e (Napier?), "phenomene" as plural of phenomena (which would have made a kind of grammatical sense weren't it for the fact that phenomena is alread the plural of phenomenon.) No doubt Wiley Finance believes that sales are unaffected by reputation.]

This book is a detailed and meticulous presentation of the calculations involved in Value at Risk (VaR) measurement. According to authors Pietro Penza and Vipul K. Bansal, Value at Risk is one of the most popular approaches to measuring the risk of harm to financial portfolios. It is a valuable institutional tool. Be aware, though, the book's message and how-to assistance will seem generally irrelevant to individual investors, except for a handful of extremely high net worth individuals at the top of the Forbes 400. Its calculations are beyond the ken of most non-mathematicians, but they will intrigue the right audience. We find this book to be a useful addition to the libraries of professional investors, bankers or risk managers, particularly those with highly developed analytical skills and a certain degree of comfort with financial engineering. Some other financial managers and lay readers will find useful information here, though they may need to walk on tiptoes through those sections of the content that are over their heads.

Penza and Bansal has done a good work on making a whole picture of Market Risk Measurement. With the clear explanation, it helps the beginners to quickly grasp the concept on Market Risk Measurement. It is well organized in 16 chapters, beginning with a few chapters on financial risk management in banking, including a review on the traditional Asset/ Liability Management. The review on Mathematical and statistical techniques is very well described. The authors also explained the analysis of pricing financial assets, including Fixed-income, equity, and derivative. Finally, they show the common methodologies to calculate VaR-Parametric, Historical Simulation and Monte Carlo Simulation.

I considered this book as a good literature review on Value at Risk, but not the step-by-step one. It provides complete set of formulas but too few examples. I recommend for beginning- and intermediate-level readers who want to know the overall concept of Value at Risk.

This is a well-written textbook for beginners in financial derivatives. It is very comprehensive as it covers various financial products. The main attraction of this book is its exercises. Many problems come from past academic papers. I benefit a lot from doing those drills.

The goal of this book is to disseminate the knowledge of a very technical subject to a very wide range of audience, including finance professionals. The author did a respectable job in that regard. With some improvement in future revisions, this book seems to be one of the best introductionary texts on stochastic calculus.

This is a really lucid and detailed introduction to derivative pricing theory from the pde way of doing things. The author is an applied mathematician, of the fluid mechanics variety, and this should tell you right away what the drift of the presentation is like.

Some will argue that all of Wilmott's books are along exactly the same line, so why do we need another pde book? Given the amazing number of textbooks dedicated to the martingale approach, it is great to have yet another, fresh way of looking at the pde approach.

The derivations come with all the necessary technical details, the style is very down to earth, and to my mind original. There are many details that I personally haven't seen in any other textbook before, and there are plenty of what seem like very useful exercises.

I really like this book, and it was a pleasant surprise to see it in a local library.