Option

This is a quick and easy guide to understanding derivatives. Excellent as a brief reference quide. Would recommend to professionals working with these products.

Just entering the business from a EE background so I am reading this book to get down terminology and concepts before reading John C. Hull. At first "selling short" sounded like something shady.

This book is written in a friendly, interesting style.

Requires some math background (high school algebra) and basic knowledge of statistics (Gaussian distribution).
I have been verifying all calculations. For the asking, I have written some programs to automate interest rate calculations and Black-Scholes (...).

Next I'll write a program to do the work of 100000 stockbrokers in finding and executing arbitrage/reverse arbitrage opportunities.

An easy to understand text that establishes the fundamentals of financial derivatives such as futures, options, and swaps with an emphasis on risk management. Great for business students.

I wanted a book that would take me step by step through all the technical day trader jargon and explain what all of it meant. Getting Started in Online Day Trading by Kassandra Bentley was just what the doctor, or in this case, the beginning day trader ordered. She takes a very solid approach to explaining what the stock market is all about, what day trading is all about, the procedures of doing day trading and the pitfalls of day trading. She is not shy in pointing out other books in order to gather good day trading information. This shows that she is very open to learning herself. Her book does a good job of not assuming that the reader already knows all about day traderese. There are plenty of sidebar notes that refer to terms and phrases within each chapter. This is a very good way of reinforcing what your have just read. One specific area that was very clear in explaination are the terms bid and ask. While other books use these terms almost interchangably and do not explain correctly who is the buyer and who is the seller, she does an excellent job of clarification on this subject. This point is probably obvious to old pros, but her insight that a beginner is not savy to these nuiances is good thinking on her part. She also goes into some detail on charting and day trading methodology, but not too much in depth. If anything, this was the only negative about this book. However, after reading other books on day trading, I believe that this book is the most straight forward and understandable of all of them. The book is well thought out and very concise.

I loved this book. I knew very little about the stock market and was interested in day trading. This book was perfect. It covered it all. In addition, it recommended other books and websites on the topics as you went along. I borrowed it from the library, then decided I had to buy it as a reference.

As the title indicates, this book is for the total beginner. The author takes the reader by the hand and guides him / her through the complex world of online day trading. All of the major areas of concern are covered: Everything from what is day trading and opening your online account to strategies and techniques used to gain profits. This book provides a great bird's-eye-view, kind of a road map for the long journey ahead. This book is not intended to cover every area of day trading with an exhaustive explanation, but rather, introduce each subject and point the reader in the right direction for further study. I strongly recommend this book. Happy trading.

A solid, fluid look at experimental economics! In these turbulent times on Wall Street (and really in markets around the world) this proves to be a great source of how we've come to this point, but more importantly, where we can go from here.

But that's not my only reason for thinking this a great book.

Ross M. Miller makes three large claims here. I think he makes good on the first two. I'm not so sure about the third, but even there he makes a case that needs to be made.

First, he explains that one branch of economics has become an experimental science.

Second, he says that this variant of economics has produced important results - theorems disclosing how markets might best be structured or restructured, and how the privatization of now-public goods might be accomplished, in ways that could produce enormous productivity gains.

He more pessimistically claims though, thirdly, that these theorems probably won't produce such gains, because in doing so they would hurt politically powerful interests.

The idea of "experimental economics" is simple enough: a college professor need only ask his students to co-operate in a simple auction-based game, so that he (and they) can observe the process by which prices come into existence under simplified conditions. Once a body of observations has developed, he and other experimenters can vary the rules and conditions of the game and observe the effect the changes have upon the trading strategies of the players and the game outcomes.

It was at Harvard University, in the 1940s, that such experiments got their start, in the classroom of Professor Edward Chamberlain. In the decades since, a body of observations has developed that in some respects supports neoclassical economic theory, but that in one crucial respect calls for its modification. Neoclassical theory needs to be modified to account for the possibility of irrational price bubbles. What is of greater policy importance, though, is that post-Chamberlainian experiments have given us a good idea of how markets can be structured to prevent bubble formation.

About 1975, when Ross Miller and I were grad students in economics, there was a consensus "economic view of the world." Economists who had to deal with the real world -- policy makers and development types -- didn't really believe it, but the mainstream did. Not only believed it, but took it for granted.

That's not true today. The consensus is fragmenting. If you want to understand the underpinnings of this intellectual shift, read Ross's book. It's written clearly, even excitingly, with well-chosen examples. And it is written by a real economist, who's trying to understand what's right and what's wrong about how we think about the economic world.

This is a book I use as an instructor but has many uses for the general reader as well. From making a decision and creating goals to resume how-to's, this is a helpful guide for those who may want a well-rounded view of career planning. What also makes this book "well-rounded" is its focus on theory. Very applicable for those who are going through a change of career or choosing a major in college.

THE CAREER FITNESS PROGRAM is a wonderful book. The reader is gently lead through the process of career exploration form self-insight to final job search. The book is written with lively language and has great clarity and precision. This new 2001 6th edition has current web references and has cutting-edge insight into the important issues of todays's world of work inculding: Americans with Disabilites Act (ADA), Career Information Services (CIS);Dictionary of Occupational Titles (DOT); North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA); and the Secretary's Commission on Achieveing Necessary Skills (SCANS). Well-organized and supremely readable, THE CAREEER FITNESS PROGRAM will appeal to mature adults seeking career change and renewal, as well as secondary, college, or graduate students. A "must-get" book in the career and job field, a "classic" to be compared with WHAT COLOR IS YOUR PARACHUTE.

As author of this book I think we did an acceptable job, mostly good clear line drawings (over a hundred), and distilled information, the result of 10 years of work collecting goldsmithing tricks. The bulleted, point form bench tricks and information is very wide ranging and essential for professionals, students and hobbyists. The point is to think your way through problem solving, to invent tools as well to to share (tricks) vernacular goldsmithing tools and tricks. There is nothing like this book in English, nothing with as much tricks information published since the 1940's.
As well, Amazon continues to falsely insist the book is out of print. All of our books are in print. All are available, from us and others, and we'd love it if Amazon actually worked with us to sell our books instead of claiming them out of print.

This book is full of practical advice on tools, construction tips, and resources. The tips on how to make your own tools will save time and lots of money. This book is now one of my most used resources for jewelry making. Well written and concise.

I consider the book a perfect guide written by a professional for professionals. If you are looking for scientific completeness and complication, go somewhere else. If you are looking for a competent down-to-earth reference, this is your book. I wonder when the third edition of this valuable tool will be published.

I work in the securities industry, and this book accurately described the markets and products without the detailed mathematics. I would recommend this book as a first reading before the Hull and White book which is much more mathematical.

Too bad it's out of print. I'd like everyone in my group to have a copy.

This directory is a recommended desktop reference for all the case managers and medical social workers in Seton Healthcare Network. It is an invaluable tool when it comes to addressing the needs of seniors and their families. For anyone who has a friend or family member needing services and information on aging issues, this is a quality guide to the many resources available in our area.

"It's my firm conviction that the product you are providing is the best of its kind in the state from any source, public or private. The resources are voluminous, logically organized, well-described and easy to search for specific areas of interest. Furthermore, the supporting material (including general advice for caregivers, web-links and cross-references between complementary resources) are uniformly helpful. As a professional in the field of aging who focuses constantly on the challenge of connecting families with sources of caregiver-support information, I regard you as an invaluable ally in our shared mission".

Reading this book produced three instances where previously encountered material was explained from a new and different point of view, the clouds parted, and I was bathed in the bright sunshine of understanding. Creation and valuation of hedging portfolios, reduced to their fundamentals, is now far less taxing to the memory. Explanations for the discretization of time and space now render previously mysterious numerical algorithms obvious in their intent. American options discused in a free boundry framework are far more intuitive than in the optimal stoping time approach. As much as I enjoyed the content, the occurence of numerous editing oversights was a considerable annoyance. This was even more surprising when I read the other customer review which indicated that one of the authors was an editor. Editors should be held to a higher standard and so I deducted an extra star!

Tavella and Randall have produced a compact, yet complete treatment of finite difference techniques in finance. I met Curt Randall in 1996 when his SciFinance software was in its infancy (though there is currently no connection between us). This software automatically generates C code to solve PDE's. That is an order of magnitude -- maybe two orders -- harder than just writing the code by hand. I inferred that Dr. Randall has a unique understanding of finite-difference methods for solving PDE's. For these reasons, I was very interested to see his book. For a more general treatment finite difference schemes, see Gordon Smith's 1986 book.

The mathematical motivations for all the techniques presented are given, with no wasted exposition. I liked the lucid analyses of stability, which many books in finance gloss over. I also liked the mention and partial analysis of a large set of solvers of sparse linear systems. having not followed the literature on jump processes in recent years, I was quite happy to see their treatment as well.

This book is all of what it claims to be, and no more. I do not recommend it as a textbook, or as a reference for those not already somewhat familiar with the subject, either from the mathematics side or the finance side. You will not get an explanation of what an eigenvalue or fourier transform is. The Lax Equivalence Theorem is cited, but not motivated or proven. No mention is given of when it might make more sense to use, say, a Monte Carlo scheme to find an option price. You won't find much economics in the book. But you will find a clear, correct, and useful analysis of more or less all aspects of finite difference schemes as they relate to solving contingent claims pricing problems.

The pricing theory due to Black Scholes and Merton is widely recognized as one of the most significant contributions of economics to practice. There are now many good introductory books surveying the vast literature on the subject. So what is needed is a book showing how to implement various models in practice. The book by Tavella and Randall is the first in what I hope is a series of such books. The authors are well known in computational circles: Tavella is the editor of the highly regarded Journal of Computational Finance and Randall is a Principal at SciComp, a leading developer of software synthesis technology for the finance industry. The authors focus on finite differences, which is an important generalization of the common tree approach, and thus is one of the most widely used numerical techniques in finance.

The book's first two chapters introduce the mathematics of financial derivatives in an intuitively appealing manner. For example, measure changes are introduced as a powerful tool without strong demands on the reader in terms of background. Also, linear complementarity is used in the context of valuing American options, again in an intuitive fashion. The third chapter introduces finite differences in the context of the familiar parabolic PDE governing derivative security values. It is in this and the remaining chapters that much useful material can be found. For example, the cell averaging technique in chapter 4 is a very useful device for dampening the error introduced by slope discontinuities which commonly occur in financial problems. The authors also give the first textbook treatment of the important class of pure jump models such as the variance gamma model, which are growing in popularity. The chapter on coordinate transformations gives the finite difference version of what some finance people term the adaptive mesh method.

In summary, this book is a must-read for anyone seriously interested in implementing derivative security pricing models. I hope the authors plan to follow up with a more advanced version which can cover such interesting topics as multi-grid, hopskotch, operator splitting, and the like.

good functional book. keeps things simple

This book does a very nice job of both explaining how exotic options work and one's motivation for using complex derivatives. Good graphs, appropriate use of equations, and plenty of actual market-based examples.

Nelken is a clear explainer of how exotic options work. One of the key features of his work is to provoke thought about useful approaches to evaluating the products. There are no pat answers when dealing with exotics, but Nelken charts a fine road map.

I purchased this book because, as a vetern trader, I know that occasionally Jake Bernstein has some insightful new ideas about methods for trading futures. However, I found this book somewhat disappointing. While a new trader may find much of the book interesting and useful, a veteran trader will find little of much value. Most of the book is concerned with order placement, basic trader psychology, etc. If you need a general primer for the futures markets, this book may do you some good. If, however, you are a veteran and well-versed in the mechanics of trading, avoid this one.

Author Jake Bernstein puts an exclamation point in his title but fills his pages with abundant cautions, caveats and confessions. This is a voice deepened by an endearing hubris, a Dutch uncle lecturing his aspiring nephews on the dangers of speculation in futures, knowing the dumb ones should be appropriately daunted and the smart ones will hear his wily insinuations that this can actually be a very good thing, if they get it. If you are a successful securities investor thinking about speculating, this will make you keep your eggs in several baskets, even though the author shares hundreds of tips. If you wonder about the significance of puts and calls, hedges and options, this is a useful, precise and unambiguous lesson. Futures trading is not an investment; it is high risk speculation. Each trading strategy requires substantial time and money, and even the best fail half the time. We from getAbstract recommend this book to investors who need a Dutch uncle to quell their urge to risk their kids' college funds - first, listen to good old Uncle Jake.

This comprehensive and well written work is one of the best new
contributions to trading for years. You can actually learn real,
objective and valuable lessons (from this book), which is quite
a rare find. Destined to become one of the basic tools in every
trader and market student's library. Not just another re-write
of someone else's earlier work, like most books on commodities.