Stock-market

The book has a lot of detailed historical information about the financial systems. Unfortunatly the author pay too much attention to history and not enough on practical fundementals. There are several errors and steps deleted in the book. Plus not enough examples are provided in comparrison to the problems assigned. Even my professor stated that the 7th edition had plenty of problems that won't be resolved until the 12-13th edition.

With respect to this book, I do agree that

1) momentum is a very important trading concept whilst MACD is a very useful oscillator type indicator to identify overbought and oversold situations, and thus change of s/t trend, a TA tool which helps traders not to buy high sell low, especially in a day trading environment.
2)the author had written a very easy reading book in a very friendly and understandable way.

However, I can hardly agree that:-

1) the author presented momentum as a surefire weapon in the highly volatile market and can be used alone
2) the author did keep it simple, but it's too simple all the way throughout the 180+ page content and he should lead the readers from simple concept to complicated application or even teach readers how to improve its accuracy with simultaneous usage of stochastics or RSI or...In fact, there are many examples/charts illustrated by the author which showed extended period of divergence with very unfavorable price moment that might have already kicked an investor out of his position, in case he/she did not have a strong brief on his/her position but by sheer reliance on MACD.

As a professional trader, I cant recommend this book to anybody. The quality of this is just so far below the author's own classic "Investment Quotient" which the author's strength (trading behavioral psychology) rests solidly upon.

this is a good book and well written. very easy to read and understand.

however, it comes across as too simple. the methods that are discussed here does not really give you the confidence that they are sufficient for you to trade properly.

another book by this author on the psychology part of trading, 'IQ the investors quotient', is a much better and strongly recommended read. in terms of market momentum, martin pring's 'trading with oscillators' is more useful, and just as easy to read.

This book offers a simple but robust method of trading on stockmarkets. The presence of many many (sometimes too many) charts makes it possible to read on the beach, not just behind the computer.
The Momentum Stock Selection method is good. Bernstein claims that you can use the method on intraday basis. This is true, but not in the same simple way as he shows in the book, it takes a lot more interpretation and experiments (on paper first is my advice!!).
His rules on do's and don'ts in trading are absolutely valuable and true, and funny to read of you have done all the don'ts already in the past.

When I looked at the cover of this book, I knew it was going to be contrarian. It shows volatility moving in the opposite direction to growth. Looking inside the book, I found the cover figure in Chapter 9 where it was described as volatility versus growth for 75 years of the Ibbotson Index starting in 1926. I looked at the Ibbotson table, and, indeed with the authors' eleven outlier years eliminated, the correlation is still negative (-.142). (With all 75 years included, I found the correlation to be (-.317).) At any rate, the Markowitzian notion of finding how large you can stand for volatility to be and then finding the portolio which maximizes growth is stood on its head.

The authors come up with an alternative to the Markowitz approach for portfolio selection based on something they call a simugram, which looks to be computer intensive.

Much of the book is spent on fundamental analysis, and indeed the authors do not seem favorably disposed to technical analysis. They dump on Black-Scholes and blame its use for the collapse of LTCM and Enron.

Some finance professionals will find much of this book annoying, since it attacks many standard concepts, such as the Efficient Market Hypothesis. And it seems to attack some of the basic tools in the finance tool kit, such as "risk neutral" evaluation.

One of the troubling things I found is that though the authors attack the canon of modern finance, they have only limited alternatives to recommend. They seem to recommend either doing deep fundamental analysis, using their complex simugram portfolio analysis, or putting one's money into an index fund. Most of us don't have the time to do the first or the software to do the second. To do the third really gives up on mathematical finance.