Option

This book builds a solid foundation on corporate applications of real options. The author is an MD and has worked many years as a medical researcher. Thus, she has a first hand knowledge in health care and pharmaceutical research. She builds on this wealth of experience to develop many interesting examples of real options related to pharmaceutical drug development. However, she is perfectly comfortable developing excellent examples across industries such as oil explorations, new product developments, and other traditional real option corporate applications.

The strengths of the book include an excellent foundation in financial option theory, a good explanation of the Black Scholes option model and the binomial option pricing model. There is also an excellent section on the history of options which date back to the age of the Pharaohs and the Greeks.

The author does also a good job at outlining the weakness of the Discounted Cash Flow (DCF) analysis method of valuing projects. DCF does not handle well uncertainty of projects outcome, and flexibility in management decision and investing schedule. These weaknesses are just where real options excel. One counterintuitive variable is that uncertainty, that corporate managers traditionally dislike, lowers the value of a project in DCF, but actually increases it in a real options framework. This is not so strange when you consider that volatility is the main driver of options values within the Black Scholes model.

The overall weakness of this book is that many examples are not so well explained from a mathematical standpoint. You are often left wanting more explanations to truly become comfortable using these techniques.

The experienced real option practitioner will find this book very interesting. The novice who wants to build a practical foundation better turn to "Real Options" written by Martha Amram and Nalin Kulatilaka which does a better job at explaining the underlying basic calculations behind each examples.

Excellent for those corporate decision makers who want to skip the theory aspect of real options and get straight to the heart of the matter. Truly accessible yet thorough, and includes many case studies to help illustrate how real options works in the real world.

This is a very comprehensive text. However, make no bones about it; the prose reflects a highly technical style of writing. If you have limited knowledge about differential equations, logic, and statistics, you will struggle to stay engrossed past the first few chapters. Hard reading is an understatment. I was hoping that this would be the book that could boil down what real options are and give me a straightforward approach to their applications. Reading this I feel like I am back in an astrophysics class at MIT.

This is an excellent book. I had been initially surprised by the critical reviews for Copeland et al. and Kulatilaka et al. (Copeland, especially, has strong credentials,) but now, having looked at those books, sadly I have to agree. Then I bought this book and found a gem. The approach is fresh and we are not just presented with the same familiar textbook routes; the best part of which is that real problems are not hammered into available but inappropriate analytical solutions. The structure of the book is unusual too: 4 chapters with the foundations (including some maths but fully accessible to managers - good diagrams and plenty of intuition), 6 chapters of case studies (one, "Dixpin" by Stark, written to link with Dixit & Pindyck, the others new and based on consulting/research - nice to see non-standard cases and also more than one underlying variable!), 4 more chapters (the title of the last, "Summary for executives", speaks volumes about the authors' helpful approach, even if you're not an executive!), and 5 appendices + glossary, etc. The appendices and cases are written in the same style as the chapters of main text and the result is a very flexible resource which, I think, will be helpful for beginners, thro' 2nd year MBA and up to quite advanced practitioners.

Even when standard techniques are shown they are given innovative explanations. For example, see pages 266-269 in Newton's Appendix 4, on numerical solution, which I believe is a genuinely new way of taking the well-known mathematical relationship between the Black-Scholes partial differential equation and the heat conduction equation but explaining it using common sense appreciation of heat and temperature (amazingly, he manages to obtain the combined call option payoff and stock price diagrams using a thought experiment in heat/temperature which I could actually understand!). In this single appendix are both the intuition for understanding the evolution of option prices and the details of finite difference calculations which any reader can readily reproduce. His explanation of the random walk for beginners (Appendix 5) is the best I have ever seen (I even liked the very British story about a drunken sailor taking a random walk near Her Majesty's Royal Naval Dockyard - fortunately, the book does not often digress with funny stories, but this one helped).

I am always wary of books with many co-authors (this one has seven) but here you could believe that one author wrote the whole book. Howell is the editor and presumably the author of the chapters which are not attributed; other parts are by different combinations of the seven. All are in the Real Options Group at Manchester Business School, England (Patel is at Cambridge) and that may explain the cohesion of the text.

In many ways this book is technically ahead of the game but you can tell that these guys are at a business school rather than a conventional university department - they know how to communicate with managers as well as students.

While the book contains much detailed information about the history, regulatory environment and composition of the world's index futures, it does not provide much practical information about the "ins & outs of trading" these contracts.

Whether you think a CAC is the sound your cat makes when coughing up a hairball or a stock index in France, if you're a new investor or an experienced trader this book is an excellent reference to stock indexes worldwide. Susan Abbott Gidel starts with a brief history of the index and futures markets. Followed by an explanation of what makes the market move, definition of the market "players", and strategies for investing in stock indexes and index futures.

The worldwide market indexes are summarized by region. Each index is individually defined in very readable layman's terms. Gidel explains what equities make up each index, how each one is calculated and how the index and index futures are traded. The book has a glossary and index that easily guide the reader through it's wealth of information making it easy to find an index comprised of stocks that suit your investment need.

I enjoyed the book and plan on making it a permanent part of my financial library. Consider this book an investment. Think of it as an essential tool for understanding equities markets and diversifying your portfolio. It is a reference you'll find yourself going back to again and again.

Like Elder's first study guide, whether this will help you or not depends on your learning style. If you don't trust that you know something until you've taken a test, this book can help. It does an excellent job of pulling out the key topics and quizzing you on them. There are no 'silly' questions here--only the important stuff. On the other hand, if you like to read and underline, then return to the text when you are actually 'doing' the activity, then this book is probably a waste of money. One nit complaint: some of the labeling of chart features is a bit unclear. Since it is sometimes tough to tell which letter goes with which feature, answering some questions is difficult, even when you know the material.

"Study Guide" parallels the book "Come Into My Trading Room: A Complete Guide to Trading" by Dr Elder. This second book challenging you at every step with questions that make you focus on all the important areas of trading. The best trading strategies, techniques, and tools are only as good as you understand them and use them. So this study book is very practical. Buy this book together with "Come Into My Trading Room" and take your time as you go through the questions and exercises. Only camp-trained soldier may survive the battle and come back alive and victorious.

I highly recommend the book to those who wants to improve the quality of their trading.

Alexander Petrochenkov

Who is to determine when prices are low or high. You can scale trade your way to oblivion very easily. The other question is how long is your money. If you have a lot of cash and you are in a market that doesn't fluctuate a lot it may work, but if you are trading the Dow Jones Futures or the S&P Futures, you are going to lose money every time.

After trading for 11 years and writing three books on the subject I can only say that I am not impressed with this strategy and anyone who promotes it as an alternative to technical analysis.

Finally there is a well-tested method for investing in commodity futures with reduced risk, based on the logic of fundamental factors rather than the fancy footwork of technical predictions. This book is well-written and clear, and brings us the straight-forward trading system successfully developed by Robert Weist in the 1970's.

The book is great in clear notation, real data examples as well as online solutions for readers with or without math background. It will be better to include some advanced theory such as Extreme Value Theory.

This is one of the most refreshing Quantitative Finance books that have come along in the last few years. This book has been a work in process from the author for at least four or five years.

Glyn Holton's mathematical background and experience as practising risk managemer and consultant is thoroughly reflected in character of this book. The notation is consistent and logical, the mathematical/theoretical presentation is rigorous but accessible to pretty much all the intermediate/advanced undergrad students.

The emphasis is on the methodological process of building a model rather than directly presenting the final product itself. This is in contrast to most of the Value-at-Risk books on the markets which up to this point, have been written mainly by academics (University professors) rather than practitioners.

Throughout the book, Mr. Holton keeps emphasizing the duality of VaR metrics in terms of the exposure and the uncertainty of its underlying portfolio. And using the conceptual differences of these two components of risk as starting point, the relevant mathematical, probabilistic, and statistical background material are presented. For the exposure component of risk, Holton presented the mathemcatical mapping procedure; while for the uncertainty component, the conditional distribution characteristization of the risk factors are thoroughly investigated. This 'Bottom-up' analytical approach breaks down the VaR metrics into its 'atomical' parts. From there the VaR measure is methodologically built from the ground up. As result all the VaR models are presented under a uniform theoretical umbrella. This is in contrast with a 'disjointed list of VaR models' approach taken by most of the available literature up to this point. The result is a book suitable for beginners and advanced practitioners alike. Well done Glyn.

Great book for the serious investor. set ups are pretty consistant. Great tech.book

If your looking for a great technical book that shows you consistent set ups, this is the one for you. This book is way under rated.

I thought I was the only woman who wept through baby showers until I read this book. Angela Hunt has been through all the struggles any infertile woman/couples faces, and she deals with the sensitively and practically in this book. I would highly recommend to any Christian couple interested in adoption.

This book is a good review of the subject. Regards, Jerry Green, Green Interest Rate Swap Management, http://home.earthlink.net/~green/

Whereas Mr. Buttler wrote The Art and Science of Basic Hangun Accuracy for the beginning shooter, this book is directed toward the shooter with at least a basic level of firearms experience. Chapters provide overviews of the shooting fundamentals such as grip, stance, and positions. More advanced techniques regarding weak hand firing, reloading, use of flashlights, and covert carry are also discussed. However, the most beneficial topic concerns the mental aspects of combat shooting and training. Mr. Buttler describes his philosophy and techniques for improving the inter-connection of the mental and physical aspects of self while using a firearm. This mental discipline provides a necessary skill and competitive edge for law enforcement officials or others interested in combat pistol shooting.