Stock-market

This book performs a valuable service to novice investors by explaining some of the realities of the stock market. Unfortunately, the poor editing makes the book awkward to read and unnecessarily hard to understand. If the publisher could do something about that before bringing out the next edition, the book could become a classic.

With better editing this book could have been a classic. The authors perform a valuable service in disposing of some common illusions regarding the stock market, but the reading experience is marred by frequent defects in the English.

This is an excellent book that is still useful years after publication. I would love to see it back in print so I can buy several more copies.

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.

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!

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!