Investment-management

This is a book on VaR masquerading as a book on Risk Budgeting. I would guess that the publisher changed the name of the book.

There are about fourty pages of three hundred that actually deal with risk budgeting: the first 153 pages are an outline of VaR. Its a fair introduction to VaR, but the title is misleading.

Although informative, the author needs almost 400 pages to say what could have easily been said in well under 100.

A book with ostensibly some structure but lacks any logical lead through. I defy anyone to make sense of his few pages on structured bonds - all he says is that they're risky and those in the know have told him that many people do not understand them. I empathize with this lack of understanding - the author shares it.

The author has a bizarre bullet point writing system - certain sentences are pulled out for emphasis for no good reason. The book is littered with grammatical errors.

A real dud, spare your money.

Do not buy this book. If you own it, don't bother reading it. The information content is negligible. The English is appallingly bad. Material often has nothing to do with the sections to which it pertains. The book is written in a stream-of-consciousness rambling mode with no apparent logic. With 115 books to his credit, Mr. Chorafas is obviously in the business of churning out books on current topics, whether or not (and based on the evidence from this book, it is very much "not") he has any knowledge or experience with the subject. Prentice Hall should be ashamed to be associated as the publisher, and obviously did very little editing before publishing the book.

This is one of the worst books I have ever read. I was lucky to sell it on zShops for half of face value. Clearly, this guy has little or no experience with crederivs, and his weak command of English just makes it worse. While I think Nelken's book is also a little thin on material, and Tavakoli's book represents a somewhat dated view of the market, both are substantially more educational than this one. My own experience suggests that one is far better off to understand bond/loan trading first, plus some structuring and capital allocation. That is enough to figure out how to trade crederivs. All this hype about the insane risk in these things is crap - it's not substantially more risky than bonds, and people have been in that business for a long time. The only essential difference - counterparty risk - is not really addressed in any satisfactory manner anywhere.

You can find more and better information simply searching the Internet.

I bought this "overpriced" three ring binder. What was I thinking? Some of the "important" material is outdated. You'd think Mr. Harmon would have updated it as many laws have changed since he wrote it. Order the "Investment Advisor Registration Package" from the SEC for free. That's where much of the material comes from. The rest is just content that has to do with starting a business. By the way this "binder" has nothing to do with starting a mutual fund company but an investment advisory company.

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 ?!

...

Don't waste your time and money on buying this book. It's too easy, too simple and nothing is there that you have not known. Completely waste of money.

The book claims to be of use to "practitioners and academics", however this book is of nil to minmal use to anyone actually working in construction project management.

The indepth modelling analysis (and almost exclusively empirical) is of no use to industry, although probably serves well as a statistics course lesson. The complex and empirical tools may have been of use in days gone by when programming and cost and revenue control software did not exist to the extent they do today.

Disappointing waste of money. Do not rely on the editorial brief in making the decision to buy this book.

The biggest shortcoming of this book is that there is nothing about fuzzy sets in it. Many of the articles have nothing to do with fuzzy anything at all (as fuzzy is commonly understood: membership functions, fuzzy logic, fuzzy set theory, etc). Those that do deal with "fuzzy" do so primarily by grafting triangular fuzzy numbers onto established algorithms, models or formulas.

The section on marketing is particular weak, almost to the point of being offensive, so if you're looking for application of fuzzy set theory to marketing, keep looking.

The utility of this book is much lower than either the highly accessible "Fuzzy Logic for Business, Finance, and Management" (Bojadziev) or the comprehensive and theoretically rigorous "Fuzzy Sets in Decision Analysis, Operations Research, and Statistics" (Slowinski).

Please DO NOT post this e-mail. It is not a review- It is a request for assistance from Amazon.com... ------------------------------------------- To whom it may concern: I work for a financial firm and deal with both consumer loans as well as real estate loans (equity lending secured by a deed of trust). I am being given a chance to become involved in aquisitions of portfolios of loans from mortgage bankers (to be purchased, following a due diligence spread and review, by my company). I am currently intensively studying 'Fabozzi's' book, "Mortgages and Mortgage Backed Securities Markets" by Harvard Business School Press. This book is a bit above me--a little bit too much, in fact. My question is this: Can you send me information on books with related subjects, which might be a bit more elementary? I need to learn this field if I'm to effectively deal with experts in the field. I've thought of writing Fabozzi directly and asking for his advice. Perhaps, short of that, however, maybe you can help? Subjects: Mortgages and the secondary markets- Securitization- FNMA, FHLMC, GNMA (agency investors), private investors and conduits- Types and structures of securities and valuation of MBS's- **Process of Due Diligence in spreading and the valuation of both individual and packaged loans and/or securities collateralized by loans-** ANY books in the field that might assist me in moving in the right direction. I'm looking for books written in theory as well as realistic practical advice, preferably for a student rather then for the expert. Please keep this in mind as I'm very new to this field. I need simpler books with which to move up. Thank you in advance for your assistance. Ron Foltz R_S_Foltz@msn.com -If the books are those that I need, I will gladly purchase them from you.

Nelken is the editor of this book, for which read, he has collated the material. There is not a coherent developing thread, it is just a mis-mash of articles about volatility. At least two of the chapters have results that are demonstrably incorrect.