Global-bonds

This book and its concept dwells into the area of the financial markets and how they affect each other. Its theory meshes with various other market theories in that if one market goes up, another may respond differently. This is one of the handful of books i would recommend to anyone beginning to get serious about the financial markets. I first picked this up in a state library, much to my amazement it was brand new and never borrowed, much like a lot of the information in it.

There is very little information out there on Intermarket analysis (see Martin Pring's "All Season Investor" and Murray Ruggiero "Cybernetic Trading Strategies" among the few to offer info in this niche). Turns out the Intermarket form of technical analysis is among the most important in analyzing the economy and the various links between financial sectors. It's a key to deciphering the intermediate and longer term trends (& with Ruggiero, possibly short term trends). Amazingly, nearly all high paid economists and many financial market analysts get it wrong, but the markets collectively don't by definition. (You can't trade an economist, there is no "economic futures index", and the economists generally aren't traders since they don't know how.) Once you have the basics of technical analysis under your belt, this book is a pivotal and necessary step forward in an education towards deciphering the increasingly interrelated worldwide financial markets. A must read, but only for the serious investor. Too complicated and difficult to use for the dilettante. I wish John would do a "year 2000" update just to freshen up the charts, but the basic relationships haven't changed much and the lessons are still totally valid.

Those who were reluctant to accept the benefits of intermarket analysis after reading Intermarket Technical Analysis (1991) will find making the paradigm shift much easier after reading his latest book published in February 2004 called Intermarket Analysis. Murphy has the benefit of some monumental market events in the last three decades to demonstrate his case and he uses them to great effect.

As John pointed out in an interview for Stocks & Commodities magazine I did with him in December 2003, it was his original goal to write the quintessential intermarket book but then found the topic so involved that each chapter could have become a book. There is just so much to discuss. Attempting to cover anything but a small snippet in a review is sheer folly. It is also impossible to do the book justice.

Markets have become so interdependent in the last decade, a correlation that continues to strengthen with time. If those who suffered financial ruin between 2000 and 2002 had read Intermarket Technical Analysis, how many of them could have avoided huge losses and even profited from what occurred? We will never know for sure but is it a risk they anyone can afford to take, especially when considering that the cost of avoidance (cost of the book) is less than $50? For those serious about making money in the market and keeping it, his new book, Intermarket Analysis is an absolute must!

Matt Blackman - Technical writer/review and regular contributor to Technical Analysis of Stocks & Commodities Mag, Traders Mag (Europe), Working Money, Traders.com Advantage, SFO Magazine

Here is an investment volume screaming for a reason to exist. Since there are now at least a couple of near up-to-the-moment resources on convertible securities information, anyone who picks up a book like this is likely to be looking for some insights or practical advice on how to buy and handle these increasingly complex instruments. If that's what the reader is looking for, s/he won't find it here. So what does one find?

Over the past 2 years I've rummaged through several Noddings books, his work from the 1970s to this present volume, and they're all cliffhangers. That is, Noddings promises to guide you somewhere, and indeed he guides you to the top of a cliff --where he leaves you hanging. Interestingly, the best observations he currently offers concern warrant hedging, which is getting increasingly difficult to do successfully. Thus what's the point of the observations, here? Most of the rest of the book is a bit like looking at an owner's manual for something you don't own, with lots of diagrams and no supporting text/instructions.

Although this is an investment volume screaming for a reason to exist, there is a screaming need for good how-to literature on convertibles and convertible hedging. Noddings should have filled this need decades ago (when he started writing prolifically about this stuff), and might have kept a worthy and useful corner niche to readers hungry to understand this market. Instead, Noddings has a much larger and expanding corner of the second-hand book bin, which is exactly where this volume will go once you've spent about 20 minutes with it.

A large proportion of this book is devoted to tables of data that by the time you get round to reading will be well out of date. ...Furthermore, as a relative newcomer to convertibles, I frankly I can't see who would find this book useful. For beginners, it skimps over the details leaving you with the feeling you haven't learned very much and the pages and pages of numbers leave you feeling angry that you've wasted your money. As for the experts, anyone who's actually in the business would know all this stuff already, and would know enough to fill in the gaps (and there are a lot of gaps). Which begs the question: why and for whom was this book written ?!

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