Market-prices

Although much of the information is now out of date, (published in 1995) the author is trying to emphasize the sad state of retirement planning among baby boomers.
-Your 401(k) and stocks are going to be in the dumper
-You will get little to no Social Security
-You will likely not have nearly enough pension money
-You'll probably have to work well past your anticipated "retirement age"
I believe that there will be ups and downs, but to preach this gloom and doom makes for very depressing reading. Those that have not been saving already know they're in for some hard times. Heck, if I were one who hadn't been saving for decades, I'd consider committing hara-kiri with a plastic butter knife after reading this.

As a Financial & Retirement Planner for over 15 years, I can attest that Mr Karpel's book is a very realistic portrayal of financial things to come. This book should be required reading for both the "baby boomer" and "X'er" generations!

This text appears to have been a technical report or a PhD thesis that was modified to become a book. The authors did their best to stretch the page count by providing basic information that is generally known by most senior-level students in electrical engineering or operations research. Even after this exercise, the "real" page count is 108. The remainder of the book was made possible by copying several standard formulas from a statistics book, by downloading and plotting some of PJM's data (isn't the Internet great?), and by providing an amateurish source code for some of the material suggested in the book for the single-unit case.

The book begins by describing the unit commitment problem, referencing a total of 9 journal articles (Page 9), but skipping most of the important references in this area. It is strange to discuss unit commitment (in a book) without mentioning the original work of Muckstadt and Koenig (1977), Merlin and Sandrin (1983), or that of Zhuang and Galiana (1988), to name a few. The authors quickly discount all previous work as being inadequate as it does not handle many of the important elements of a system (leading you to believe that they are going to discuss these issues), such as network constraints or losses. I suggest that they refer to "The Generalized Unit Commitment Problem" by Baldick, IEEE Transactions on Power Systems, 1995, for a discussion on this subject. I also strongly recommend that Mr. Allen and Ms. Ilic obtain a copy of (the outdated) "Unit Commitment Literature Synopsis" by Sheble and Fahd, IEEE Transactions on Power Systems, 1994. It may serve as a starter on this subject. The most impressive aspect of this book is its depth, or lack there of. The authors manage to provide their deep knowledge of the unit commitment problem and its solution techniques in less than 5 pages.

Chapter 3 describes the unit commitment in a deregulated environment in the most simplistic fashion possible (indicating the authors' lack of any true experience in this business) resulting in six pages of basic material. In chapter 4, the reader is presented with a pathetic review of dynamic programming. Chapter 5 is even more interesting. The authors assume a known price process in the market and optimize each individual generating unit based on these prices. They discuss (in less than 7 pages) the use of dynamic programming to solve the unit commitment (in reality a single generator) with and without generation limits using normal and lognormal price distributions. For those of us teaching dynamic programming to senior or master level students, the three models could serve as a homework assignment. If you are a "quant" on the trading floor, you may want to derive these formulas during your lunch hour.

Chapter 6 is entitled "Price Process of Electricity". Thanks to the statisticians of this world, the reader is bombarded with endless tests and distributions describing electricity prices. The authors skillfully demonstrate their ability to use Matlab to draw a large number of graphs.

I must admit that I stopped reading when I reached Chapter 7 "Computational Complexity of the Unit Commitment". The authors say that the dynamic programming is widely used for solving stochastic optimization problems "however, it also has the disadvantage of non-polynomial (NP) growth of operation count with respect to problem size." They refer the reader to the book by Bertsekas on Dynamic Programming and Optimal Control. The authors abruptly shy away from discussing this subject. Given the depth of the book, I would have expected a proof showing that the problem being discussed (the unit commitment) is NP. It is not sufficient to say that their formulation suffers from exponential growth. If the matter is so simple, I have several problems that I modeled as dynamic programs and would like to claim that they are NP (including a couple of linear programs that I solved using dynamic programming as I was lazy to call the LP solver).

In summary, the book is a waste of time and money. It is a sad demonstration of how tenure and graduation pressure can lead people to publish garbage. If you need to learn about this subject, I suggest searching the web for articles related to deregulation. Then, you can buy Bertsekas's book (or refer to your notes from college), use your good old Schaum's Series on statistics, and derive the results that truly fit your problem.

The unit commitment problem is stated using math formulas which contain 28 symbols. To understand the formulas, it is necessary to memorize the definition of each symbol. If you have the patience, you can translate the formulas into something coherent in about 3 hours. The result is rather straight forward and forms a basis for understanding which, theoretically, is the purpose for which the book was written.

For those who are already familiar with the symbols, see the review by the reader from Yonkers.

Excellent book. Definite keeper for anyone working in the market. Appreciate the source code and data which backs up the paper. For those who believe in cost based world, get this book and compare your results

the title of this book should read: 'the mindset of shareholders in a range bound stock'; in his conclusion, the author wrote,"using an understanding of crowd psychology to enchance trading is actually the subject for a whole new book". so this book is actually for absolute biginners in the stock market who has no knowledge of technical analysis or its basis. it's a waste of time for anyone who has just a little of insight into trading. the entire book can be found in one section of a good technical analysis book, just look up 'triangles', rectangles, or range bound trading. and their breakouts. the author just describes the thinking behind various individuals in these situations, with much repetitions. it's a wonder i read til the end. the author did recommend some books in the second last page for 'better reading' though. 2 stars for his honesty and stated objectives.

Market participants are often emotional and irrational in their decision-making -- much like any crowd. In fact, to understand crowd psychology is to better understand the financial markets.

So says Carl Gyllenram, author of "Trading With Crowd Psychology," a book that claims market analysis is more behavioral science than anything else. While allowing that economic information and fundamental changes produce major market shifts, he believes that the conformist (and predictable) behavior of market participants -- the crowd -- is what usually drives price action.

Some traders and investors react late to changes in the market because they rely solely on fundamental and economic information available to everyone else. Others may use use technical analysis -- but end up trading off of conflicting indicators and/or stereotyped chart patterns.

Chart patterns are "people patterns," says Gyllenram, reflecting the behavior of everyone buying and selling in the markets. A successful technician understands the psychological dynamic (hesitancy? panic? resignation?) at play within these patterns, most all of which, he maintains, are simply variations of a trading range. Markets most often move laterally, with little significant price movement up or down.

An intuitive feel for market psychology helps the trader or investor understand how these trading ranges are structured.

Of particular interest to me were "balance points" -- those price levels at or near the top and bottom of a trading range that serve to predict a powerful price breakout. "You can never be sure," he says, "when a range will be broken or what direction a breakout will take. But trading with an understanding of crowd psychology and the ability to identify balance points certainly increases your odds. The important message you need to be able to read in a chart is when a clear change of the psychology is taking place. You must understand that the creation of a balance point is a powerful indication that the behavior of the market majority has shifted."

Gyllenram uses a clever approach to help us understand ( and profit from) the phenomenon of crowd psychology as it relates to market analysis: He uses a number of characters, each representing a different "category" of investor who own positions above a trading range (after a long uptrend), as well as below it (after a steep decline). What all have in common are emotional patterns of crowd behavior formed after large price movements (up or down) that make people nervous, excited or otherwise irrational.

Which character will remind you...of you?

This book really gave me a new perspective on the stock market. I wanted to understand why prices move up and down the way they do in the market and in other books I haven't got that knowledge. In this book however I found what I have sought after for a long time ; a explanation how people act in the market place and how their emotions affect their trading and therefore prices. For somebody like me, that really wants to understand market psychology this book was very valuable reading. If you are not intrested in psychology and instead are looking for new indicators this is the wrong book. But, if you have a desire to really understand crowd psychology in the stock market this is absolutely a book to read.

I have a university maths degree and found the book very obvious and drawn out for the first few chapters. In spite of this I looked forward to what was going to be explained later. Suddenly from a very simple and easy to understand explanation on the EMH he starts to use mathematics in his equations that I had a lot of difficulty following. There was very little or no explanation of how these equations were arrived at and a lot of mathematics and statisics is assumed. This book does not apply the theory in ny meaningful way to the markets let alone the capital markets in my opinion. I found that I took very little away from this book and would not recommend it to anyone who has basic mathematics like myself or is looking for some deeper insight into the markets. I would hate to have Mr Peters as a teacher based on his book.

The second edition of this book was published in 1996. The book
seems to be largely based on Feder's 1988 book "Fractals". The
dated nature of this book means that it is missing later work
on long memory processes, which Peters estimates using the Hurst
exponent.

As one reviewer already noted, don't assume that this book will
provide much in the way of useful equations. For anyone who wants
more than an overview, this book is a disappointment. Peters does
a poor job of explaining the equations and I did not find enough
detail to implement the algorithms discussed (I turned to Feder's
book and various journal articles). The book does come with a
"floppy" disk containing the Visual Basic algorithms. This is
a poor choice, since C is pretty much the lingua franca for
algorithms.

The various chaos and fractal techniques are applied to a handful
of financial data sets, but this is far from even a solid
suggestion that these techniques might be useful to anyone
developing real market models.

Some of the conclusions that Peters draws (cycles in financial
data) do not seem to be supported the evidence he presents.

In summary, if you are looking for something beyond an overview,
save your money. Feder ("Fractals") has a better description of
RS calculation. "A Non-Random Walk Down Wall Street" by Lo
and MacKinlay has a chapeter on the application of the RS
statistic and long-memory processes which is much better than
Peters. For those who need to simulate fractal brownian motion
(data sets with a particular Hurst exponent) "The Science of
Fractal Images" by Barnsley et all is a good reference.

I read this book, the 1991 version, years ago. Around 1980 my own attempts to crack share prices statistically convinced me that all share prices behaved like a Gaussian random walk meaning that all speculation was comparable with playing roulette and I am not one of those guys who usually wins when gambling. This view was strengthened when the option pricing model came up, meaning that even the real pro's in the field assume that share prices are nothing but a random walk. This book has opened my eyes to the fact that there is much more to randomness than just the Gaussian curve. Share prices are not fully random. Impressive is the demonstration that an RS analysis on the real data is different when applying the same RS analysis on scrambled data. So there is information hidden in these time series, somewhere. Since then I have picked up the subject of cracking time series again with great pleasure. I think this book is exceptionally well written and without it I doubt if I would have been able to follow Mandelbrot's book "scaling and fractals in finance" that I bought later. The book is about understanding a subject, not about learning a simple formula to apply on a time series.

I am a new investor to the stock market. I have never bought a stock before in my life. I came accross the book and read it 4 times. After reading the book I opened an online account and started trading using Ted's principles. In 5 months my total portfolio is down 2%. Not good news for a first time investor. I have faith in the long term, wich is what Ted said over and over againg in his book. Patience is the key. In this day and age of jumping on a hot stock and riding the momentum, these timeless principles are not for speculators. I just wonder how many speculators make big returns in the long term. Buying low and selling high makes the most sense to me. How else, other than using a long range price chart do you determine if a stock is in a low or high price range. Certainly not reading the latest news on a company, or a earnings report. I bought my stocks in thier low range and am confident they will move higher. Just look at the charts as I have done for countless hours and you will find that Ted's principles are true. Even the big blue chips do it, hell for that matter I have never seen a stock chart who's price has not moved from a base to a high price and back down to start another base. How do explain this? I will make a prediction on these hot tech stocks of late. You are starting to see distribution take place. This will continue to occur for some time before the big fall begins to eventually start another base. They will never be real cheap againg like they were in the early 90's. Just what Ted's book say's happens to all stocks. Just you wait and see.

Have read a TW book twice in life... in college and failed to see the wisdom... and this book about 5 years ago. Tried my best to learn and also followed a newsletter dedicated to TW market strategies. Three years ago portfolio account started and traded buying at TW breakout points and not before(equal shares in each holding), cutting losses on all stocks that did not follow through after breaking out...letting the others ride. The results as of today: current long 6 stocks up 3%, 103%,196%, 292%,323%,& 1074%. It is not get rich quick, but it does work. Up almost 11 times your money is nice but it is time to let this one go...check 3 year chart on OHB! Judge for yourself!

I received my first copy of Ted Warrens' book in 1993. I've had quite a bit of time to test and use his techniques and the results have been phenomenal! Anybody can learn to use the simple, proven strategies after the first reading. And the best part is you can try them on paper and find out that they do indeed work. Ted's insight was amazing to say the least. He understood that all markets are manipulated. But more importantly he understood how to profit from the knowledge. I've read many different "how-to" publications about the stock market but none can touch the prudent, sound, easy-to-use strategies that Ted Warren taught. I can't think of a better tool for any investor! 'How To Make The Stock Market Make Money For You' gets two thumbs up!

Total waste of time. Has a few trivial points on dealing with realtors. Buy Effros book on "Sell Your Home in 5 Days" if you want to go the FSBO route. I am an investor who owns 40 residential properties. This book will go on my shelf as minor reference because I maintain a library. I only recommend this book if you are so shaky in the knees that you are affraid of trying Effros round robin auction on your home.

This book is useless because of its clear bias against selling by owner. Even a real estate agent knows that the best way to sell your house fast and net the highest amount of money is to sell it yourself.

BOTTOM LINE: A poor attempt by a real estate agent to promote the commission-based real estate industry.
Book is useless!

This book contains some very good advice if you are able to weed out the almost embarrassingly biasede pro-realtor misinformation.

Pros: Good info on writing ads, what to do--and not to do--when preparing the home for sale.

Cons: Biased and untruthful information for FSBO sellers, concentrates whenever possible on how difficult it is for FSBO to succeed without the special care that a professional real estate agent can bring to a sale. It would be laughable if it weren't intimidating to first time FSBO prospects.

If you can get past the manipulative realtor hype, there's good info here.

Don't pay full price for this one unless you aspire to being a realtor or are related to one.

Although there were many black and white photos there were no 'high quality' color photos. I found the section on my part of the country, the midwest, painfully lacking. I have yet to positively identify any of my twenty or so arrowheads using this book.

I have enjoyed my copy of this book, finding it particularly helpful in typing points, though not as much so in valuing. In response to the kind reader from Mass., all the point hunters I know, myself included, only hunt sites that are already culturally & historically ruined (i.e. plowed fields), with express permission of the private landowner. We don't go looking for burial mounds,etc. With regards to points being a non-renewable resource, true. BUT, I know of several fields that have been hunted for easily 100 years, and still produce points with each plowing. Many sites were in use as camp or village sites for literally thousands of years. I respectfully suggest that the kind reader turn attention more to construction sites and new road projects when looking for where true historical sites are being desecrated and ignored. Often, these sites are "overlooked" to avoid having projects put on extended (read here, expensive years) hold while the site is thoroughly researched. Happy Hunting!

Great book! Many, many pictures from all regions including the NE. The best book I've found for a vast array of artifacts, many styles, examples etc. A great help for the novice collector! Many great ads for arrowhead sites on the web as well. Finally a visual guide to "see" actual pieces not just sketches!

This text offers absolutely nothing. It is either far too simplistic or misses chunks of valuable detail.

There are far better introductions to the energy markets (e.g. Stephen Errera's Trading Energy Futures & Options or Peter Fusaro's Energy Risk Management) - buy one of these instead!

Patronizing style and too many mentions of his wife's book. Poor content - give it a miss.

"Managing Energy Risk" gave me the information I needed to answer technical questions about energy risk in an actual job interview. My answers must have been good because I was offered and happily accepted an energy risk management position! This is a great introduction and summary of energy risk management, which I believe was intended for managers and others like myself who just want a thorough overview. Several technical concepts are discussed in this book, but the author leaves the gory details for other sources. Among other things this book covers: 1) the current status of the electric power industry and a brief historical perspective, 2) risk management policies and procedures, 3) the different players involved in energy risk management, and 4) the foundations, basics, and some of the peculiarities of energy risk management. I recommend this book to anyone looking for a solid foundation in energy risk management.

Despite Mr. Hassett's track record with his previous book "Dow 36,000," I saw him appear on CNBC during the early morning show and thought that he did well enough that I should buy the book. He promised that you could use his book to figure out what stocks were overvalued and which ones weren't. A pretty important topic given the current market environment. However, after reading this short book I have no idea of how to actually rank stocks on the 1 to 6 scale that he uses. He doesn't actually provide concrete examples, only that he says that he put together this ranking and it worked really well. My other problem is that if this approach works so well how come he didn't use it when his "Dow 36,000" book came out when the stock market was at its peak. Some explanation would have been useful for why Hassett, who is marketing this book as a full proof approach to spotting bubbles, wasn't able to use this approach himself over just the last couple of years to warn people and predict which stocks were going to crash, a period when he was supposedly writing this book. Claiming that you use a not clearly stated formula to identify overvalued stocks after they have already crashed seems like a scam to me.

The young co-author of Dow 36,000 writes a summary of theories regarding financial bubbles. (Thank goodness he doesn't pursue the earlier book's theory on the stock market's risk premium.) Unfortunately, this is not a practical bubble detector.
This is a quick, pithy read with lots of information and a bibliography to point the way for further study. He contrasts the efficient market theory with other ideas that suggest the market can be beaten. It's too bad this book is not longer and more substantial. Maybe Devil Take the Hindmost or Tulipomania would make a nice follow up to this simple intro.

I saw a favorable review in the New Yorker so I took the plunge and bought the book, even though I never read finance books. This is one of the most interesting books I have ever read. While its easy to say there was a bubble after the fact, this book looks at the work of the real scientists who have been searching for hard scientific evidence of bubbles. The book has very well done dialogues that help make the material entertaining. I never expected that the search for bubbles would provide so much insight into how the world works.

I have a copy of this book, along with dozens of other books on antique bottles and collecting them. It is one of the least worthwhile of them all, and I am including books published in the 1960s with more listings, better photos, etc. The book shows mainly bottles that are more easily found in the West, and chances are that the bottles you want to find info on will NOT be listed. (Of course, no book can list them all, as there have been hundreds of thousands of different bottles made-just in the US alone). But Mr. Polak's book is a hyped mess of misinformation, fuzzy b&w photos (although he does include a lovely centerfold layout of several beautiful bottles in full color!!) and a "quick course" on identifying the age of bottles which is almost useless, as the problem of learning the true age of a bottle is not always as simple as he makes it sound. The list of glass factory marks has been copied from other writers who copied from Julian Toulouse's book on bottle makers' marks, and some of those are in error just as he first presented them in 1971. Production dates of bottles listed must be taken with some caution. Some of the bottle club information is very outdated, having been lifted from old magazines that are 20+ years old. Information is often vague, with little explanation of exact condition, damage, or the exact embossing variant being referred to, which can make a HUGE difference in the value of a bottle in some cases. I think every bottle collector should have a copy, but mainly as another checklist they can refer to, in order to help find out what all is out there in the field of antique bottles that they MIGHT eventually run into at antique malls, bottle shows, yard sales or by digging them themselves. Values are mostly overrated, some are too high, some are too low. Overall, this book is an example of the type of material that I find disheartening: Lots of HYPE, but not much solid, worthwhile information for the serious bottle collector/hobbyist/historian/digger/amateur archeologist out here!!

Don't buy this book. It is a waist of money and time. I have a lot of old bottles and can't find one of them in this book. It says it is the best book for bottle collectors. If it is, why can't I find even a Vicks Vapo Rub cobalt bottle in it?? I am very dissatisfied.

The begining of this book has lots of useful information including digging and diving for bottles. However, I was disappointed with the amount of pictures. The descriptions for most bottles were vague. I rated it a 2 because of the extensive listing of Jim Beam bottles. If you collect Jim Beam this would be a worthwhile book.