Option

I bought this book but it only contains outdated information.e.g on computers that should be used. The book is not true to its title of how to start day trading. Junk info like getting internet connection, comfortable chair etc are frustrating. Basic info like defining trading terms like t & f analysis, what are options & futures can be gleaned from anywhere free of charge. It is unwise to spend money on this book. If one just asks people on the message boards he will get the info free of charge.

This is in response to the first review of this book, written Nov 13, 2000 - The book came out Oct 27, 2000, right? And you were given this book by a 'veteran trader'? So, in 17 days, this 'veteran' trader read this book, it changed his life, and then he passed it along to you, and you read it too? C'mon. Obviously this review was written by the publisher or author(s). I, however, have read this book. But I can say this much. This book is more geared to the beginner, and as such it is very dangerous to recommend that a beginner day-trade futures and options. This book should not be used as the basis for actually getting into any sort of day trading.

Recently, a friend--a veteran trader--gave me a gift he said would help me--a novice--further my education. The gift consisted of two books: Oz' "The Stock Trader" and Katz and McCormick's "How to Start Day Trading Futures, Options, and Indices." As far as I'm concerned, these two books complement one another perfectly. One provides insight through example and the other provides basic knowledge and procedure. These books have not only helped me improve my trading and money management skills, but my appreciation of the nuances of the game.

Weather and energy derivatives constitute a 'hot' topic in the derivatives market with new articles, reviews and websites sprouting everywhere. So, this book may seem a timely publication on the topic, given the fact that there are very few publications available on this topic.

However, unless you know nothing about the subject, I do not recommend to buy this book: timeliness seems to be its only quality.

Most articles are descriptive of products and markets and contain little information of interest to risk managers / traders / insurance professionals working in the field. The article on options is a general article on Black Scholes with little or no relevance to energy or weather derivatives.

In brief, it looks as if this book were written for purely commercial purposes. Definitely not worth its high price.

Since my first review, a number of people have asked for more comments on this book. I have therefore written a more detailed review:

This book contains a series of articles covering developments in the areas of Insurance Derivatives, Securitisation and Weather Derivatives. The Weather Derivatives section comprises four articles written by key industry players. It serves as a useful introduction to the weather derivatives market for the newcomer.

The first article provides a broad introduction to weather derivative instruments, contrasting them with weather insurance products. It looks at the weather risk market in terms of the energy chain, from producers through to consumers. The article gives an overview of the most common type of weather derivative presently traded, those based on "degree days". Finally, valuation of weather derivatives is touched on.

The second article presents the current state of the weather derivatives market and summarises the types of deal that have been entered into to date.

The final two articles provide a more in-depth analysis of pricing degree day instruments and cover issues such as: ·Establishing correlations between revenue streams and temperature variables; ·Use of historical data to extrapolate valuations, including a brief look at the appropriate selection of data and 'de-trending' issues; ·Introduction to stochastic temperature modelling; ·Using value at risk techniques in the context of weather derivatives.

Some of the articles in the book are freely available in the public domain, and this may deter potential purchasers interested in weather derivatives from buying the book. In addition, the book would benefit from some advanced articles covering the use of more sophisticated valuation techniques. As it stands, however, this book is a useful introduction for newcomers to this rapidly growing market, with well chosen articles that provide a good basic grounding.

There are only four chapters on weather derivatives themselves and these seem, at a glance, to be mainly re-writes of material that is already available on the internet, e.g. one written by Enron, one by Southern Company Energy Marketing.

Nevertheless, the contributors are key players in the market and this book serves as a useful summary of the available literature. I would have liked to see some advanced material, including explanation of more sophisticated pricing models, but that is perhaps best left to a subsequent text.

The book is certainly not cheap, though it is not unreasonably priced - especially when compared to the amount of money companies are throwing away through failing to manage their weather risks...

What a waste of money. The very title itself is misleading, as well as horribly arrogant. This book is certainly not worth its price.

First of all, there's a heavy air of religious overtone throughout the book. The author implies that the reader must "move beyond philosophical speculation into the arena of personal commitment (through religion)". Philosophy is a creature of its own right; it does not need to be saddled by religion.

Secondly, the author claims that there are only 3 branches of philosophy: Axiology-ethics (yes, it's been lumped together), epistomology, and metaphysics. To correct the author: there are SIX branches of philosophy. That's half the branches he chopped away! What'd he do, pay attention to half his philosophy class?

This book is also heavily ethics-skewed, from page one to back cover. This is an incredibly poor introduction to philosophy; if you're going to learn the field, get a book that at LEAST talks about all SIX of the branches.

A book I reccomend is "Archetypes of Wisdom: An Introduction to Philosophy" by Soccio.

This [stuff] deserves no stars - but, it recieves one not because of the mandatory Amazon.com standard, but because it at least doesn't use 25 cent words.

This book is a pain. The author can't get to the point of what he is talking about. He gives points of view of deferent people but never gives enough so you can get what he is talking about. I find it hard to understand the subject because of the lack of clear definitions. As a student I find this book hot for the resale. The worst part is I love the class I just can't stand the book.
Just my two cents.

In 1968, when I got back from Vietnam and went back to college, my first Philosophy course used the first edition of this work as a supplemental text. It worked so well that I consulted it all the way through my undergraduate education. In 1978, when I got my first job teaching Philosophy, I chose to incorporate what was then the third edition in my Introductory classes. Good books tend to last and go into reprints and newer editions. I have used every subsequent edition and, at this time (2004), I am using the ninth edition of INVITATION TO PHILOSOPHY -- and I plan to stay with every newest edition of the text until I retire. It works!!!

The adverse excursion evaluation and exploitation does play an important role in systematic trading, however, the book later on skin-deep touches trading management and betting strategies, which in turn do not have much to do with the title of the book.

Warning: Read book very slowly

The concept requires total concentration-while reading, on the reader's part in order to throughly understand MAE. The idea is a sound one but requires that the reader provides a working system AND is able to backtest it. Otherwise, the reader is left with a concept that on paper makes sense but it is very hard to implement into his/her trading system.

As a professional futures trader, I bought this book in the search for new ideas to refine my money management rules. I have been utilizing the same trading system for years, but this book has enabled me to capture more of my systems open profit, while also limiting the size of potential losing trades.

If you do not currently have a trading system, this book will not give you one. The purpose of this book is to help the trader eliminate some of the rough edges of an existing system's money management procedures.

If you are trading a system, or wish to learn more about money management rules, pick up a copy of this book, as many new ideas are discussed. Also, be sure you are using Microsoft Excel, as spreadsheets are used frequently throughout the book, and duplicating the examples is useful.

This is a surprisingly sloppy book written by a known academic in the financial engineering world. That is Marco Avellaneda. At first sight, this book is a good idea. It is suppose to bridge the gap between literature that are too simplified for quants and the high level books that are too mathematically rigorous for pratitioners. However this book is presented in such a sloopy manner that any profit driven company would sack these two authors. There are typo mistakes in almost every page and some fundamental errors. There are numerical examples there are completely wrong. On top of that, who writes a quant book without giving any exercises. The authors should comprehend that mistakes in quantitative books can be very misleading to the reader especially if the reader is trying to learn. If you don't have a Ph.D. in Math, don't read this book. It might do more harm than good.

This book is written by the two well-known applied mathematicians - Marco Avellaneda of the Courant Institute and Peter Laurence of the University of Rome. Avellaneda has been involved in financial mathematics for a number of years, while Laurence's interest in this subject is more recent. The book can serve as a useful introduction to the quantitative analysis in financial markets. As such, it covers a lot of ground stretching from an exposition of the standard Black-Scholes theory to an interesting description of the HJM framework. In addition to the standard material, it contains several original results developed by the authors themselves. The first printing had so many typos that its study was difficult for a novice. Most of these typos had been corrected in the second printing. In its present form, the book can be strongly recommended to a general reader with interest in the mathematical finance.

This book is no doubt written in haste and typos are galore. I have read this book in its entirety and I highly recommend it. Concepts well covered include Binomial trees, Brownian motion and stochastic calculus, APT, HJM formulation, etc. It is a great stepping stone to get to Duffy's book. A second edition would be a great idea.

This book is not especially hard to get into, but finishing it really is a challenge. The whole plot centres around a group of alien beings who crashed on Earth in the thirtienth century and now a wealthy Englishman is trying to revive them, even if it means starting a nuclear war. A solid enough plot. However, its just the way it's done that I dont like. The aliens feature in it at only two points both of which are relatively short. If it wasn't for those two brief sections of the story you wouldn't know the plot even involved aliens and at times it seems to run independently of them. It does feel very Bondian at some points, especially in the parts involving the Russians and the Americans. Not a bad novel, just incredibly boring.

A better title for OPTION LOCK might be - DOCTOR WHO, OR HOW I STOPPED WORRYING ABOUT THE BOMB AND LEARNED TO LOVE SAM IN A WET T-SHIRT... and yes, the wet t-shirt does make it into this novel, and it's just as odd and misplaced as pretty much everything else found between the pages. OPTION LOCK, the Eighth 8th Doctor adventure, is an odd mix - just by reading it you can tell that nearly all of this book must have been written and submitted by Justin Richards to other publishing houses and rejected. It's a gripping tale of US nuclear policy and a secret space defense platform known as STATION NINE - with this in hand, he hammers in the Doctor and Sam, steals BIG from the Third Doctor's adventure - THE DAEMONS (almost all the plot and feel from that adventure is in OPTION LOCK - if the BBC didn't own it, and this wasn't a DOCTOR WHO novel... they would have sued), plus adds in the Fifth Doctor's THE AWAKENING - and hopes for the best. But it dosen't work - Sam and the Doctor are hardly in this novel, and even when they are, they are reduced to playing roles that just outright bore you and make you cringe (see said passage about the wet t-shirt). Sam still is one of the worst WHO companions - and I think I finally have found the reason why, and it's this: she has no skills. None. Other than biting her fingernails, hiding, and still making eyes at the Doctor - she does nothing. At least with other companions, they had a talent - Ace could fashion explosives (and she could fight), Susan was a Time Lord, Viki was a mental giant, and on and on and on... the only companions Sam might feel at home with are Mel (who never got an introduction in the series proper) and Dodo (who never got an exit - she just disappears about two episodes into THE WAR MACHINES and is never seen again) - but they are rare cases. Overall, this book is just plain dull and offers nothing new to the DOCTOR WHO universe. But, they are becoming harder to find... so if you're a collector, I recommand picking one up to make the set - but as for entertainment, you're better of either writing your own - or watching the series on tape.

OPTION LOCK is a very visual book, perhaps one of the most visual Doctor Who books I've ever read. This means that there's a lot of dialogue, a lot of action and not a lot in the way of character introspection. We get a lot of information about what things physically look like, where they are in relation to each other and comparisons to other objects. The locations are vast and sprawling. We have a large James Bond type control room with giant view screens and computers with blinking lights. It comes complete with it's own Bondian villain with a silly twitch under his eye.

This visual flavour makes the story feel more like the book version of a multi-million-dollar film that's already been shot rather than an adventure that's written specifically for the book format. However, this is not necessarily a bad thing at times and to the author's credit, it's done very well here. The visual nature of the prose leaves the reader with several of the pivotal scenes etched into the mind. It has a very large and cinematic feel to it that can be quite enjoyable if one is in the mood for that. The plot is not actually overly complicated, yet the action moves forward fast enough to keep things enjoyable.

In short, this is a fairly good, fast-paced, solid action-adventure. It's quite entertaining and if you're looking for something that's light but not at all bad, this is probably one of the early BBC books that you should look into.

This book deals around a concept and from page one tries to relate that concept with W. D. Gann. Over the years I have noticed that when people wnat to sell a book dealing with anything relating to the financial markets they call for W. D. Gann to help. Gann as a trader used very simple rules (swing trading) and none of the mystical stuff which made him known. In fact the mystical stuff came AFTER Gann retired from trading. Now, it is up to you: the concept explained in this book is actually FALSE and does NOT work. There is a forthcoming book by this author together with someone called Robert Krausz. I have been given that book to read and I come to the very same conclusions: 1) they want to sell and make money selling books 2) to do that they think up of an attractive concept and, 3)they ask W. D. Gann for help. Concluding: if you plan to make money in the markets then you shouldn't even consider these books!

This book presents supposed statistical analysis of prices hitting, supporting or resisting intraday, depending on the previous day closing price and opening price based on pivot levels.

Some of the percentages present apparently good trading opportunites. However, there are six zones and hence 6 close x 6 open price combinations and the six levels which price the can hit during the day. You can get an idea as to how many permutations (trading setups) there are.

Although this is supposed to be a statistical analysis, with nice percentage numbers, the data would be more attractive if the P values and the n were included. Basically you will have to backtest each combination to verify the worth of the percentages for each promising setup.

Pecentages also vary quite a bit between different markets although some nice correlations do exist.

The book presents a lot lot more numbers than most books and therefore deserves appropriate credit. Some of the better stats can be tested in simple backtesting programs.

Would be more reasonably valued at a lower price than the listed retail.

.... this book is filled with lots of white space, blank pages and mostly useless information. It's a very quick read, and has some limited trading appeal. The logic is very similar to market profile and daytraders' pivot numbers. Price seeks to reach a middle ground "pivot" - shaped like a bell curve, with the most activity in the middle and least on the extreme ends. This book throws a whole bunch of stats of percentages of what happened when in particular ranges. This is similar to market profile, with a vague theory of generalities, and requires you to work with wide stops within zones. Market profile and floor pivot number traders may find this book useful in linking together a method , but overall .. this book isn't worth buying.

The reviewer that wrote the poor and misleading review described the book perfectly.

In a 4 page passage of the book I found at least 10 errors involving contradictions between text, tables and figures. This becomes very frustrating if you are trying to reproduce the results Gately achieved--a task I have found impossible.

Gately also claims great success however he does not test his neural nets on a validation set of data. This is a fatal error in real trading. It is therefor impossible to determine if he was successful at all.

It is clear that Gately does not have a background in quantitative sciences, as he has little skill in accurately and completely reporting procedures and results.

The idea of the book and the trial and error approach is good but another author should write the second edition.

About the only positive thing I can say is that he has done a good job at capturing the feel of the trial and error process that is so necessary in developing a neural network model. That said, I could write a book about what's wrong with the book. There is so much poor advice and misinformation in the book, I would scarcely know where to begin. As I read it, I literally cringed at the so-called "information" being passed on to the unaware.

His errors includes poor sampling of test data, no validation data, poor data preparation, highly correlated inputs, small sample size, basing design changes in on insignificant changes in error, etc.

The extensive bibliography may be useful to some, but I would bet my net worth that it is not a list of books he has read. If you have a copy of Azoff's book on forecasting, you will find that Gately essentially cribbed the bulk of his bibliography from Azoff. The few remaining entries were cribbed from the bibliography found in the Neuroshell literature. The book is fairly heavy with hype for the Neuroshell product. (Not that it's a bad product.)

If you're thinking of buying this, I would recommend instead Master's Practical Neural Networks in C++. Doesn't matter if you don't program, it has plenty of good text, and most importantly, sound advice.

What does this book promise?

"Succinctly explains how neural networks function, what they can accomplish as well as how to use, construct and apply them for maximum profit."

Ok, so perhaps it should say .... An introductory text with basic definitions and a example of how to use a neural network to predict the S & P 500. But even on the grander promise this book delivers. The book is too basic for those previously familiar with NNs, but perfect for someone who merely would like to begin and fears the prospect of becoming too frustrated to finish. Gately points out potential snares and discusses how to overcome them and walks the reader through a project. He describes how to preprocess the data to ensure meaningful results.

I have followed his steps and have been very please with my project, this book and the value I received when purchasing it.

I am an avid reader of adoption books and this title is not the only book that has adoption professional info as Ms. Adamec states. There are others on the market in which cover all types of adoption professionals-agencies, attorneys, facilitators, counselors, consultants, adoption-service providers, etc.

While the book touched on the highlights of requirements for adoption, I was disappointed that it did not go into further depth of the entire process. The majority of the book consisted of listings of certain requirements of agencies throughout the U.S. I was hoping for a little more guidance through the process.

This book was very informative; however, most of the book lists adoption agencies in all 52 states. While this is helpful, it is almost the entire book. This book is not a one-stop adoption resource book. The book should go more indept as to the different steps involved. For instance, the book mentions home study; however, there is no mention as to what exactly is a home study. What are they looking for, what kind of questions do they ask, etc. I think this book is worth buying, because it does have a lot of information in it, but you will need to buy other books as well.

We are quite amazed that this was even released with as many errors and outright OMMISSIONS as it had!! It was ridiculous! Some of the chapters towards the end of the book "featured" illustrations that didn't match the text at all. Also, some text referred to illustrations that didn't exist etc... This is the absolute WORST "Secrets" book we have ever purchased. We still intend to pursue getting our money back for this fiasco.

I have W98 Secrets and Linux Secrets which are good books. NT Secrets is worthless. The Secret is that there are no Secrets in this book. If you remove material from the book that doesn't deal with NT or is just NT marketing, you lose about 75% of the book. The little material left is nothing that you couldn't get from normal documentation. If you are looking to get any in-depth knowledge of NT, this book is not the one to get.

Mr. Brelsford hits the nail right on the head with this book. I have been an NT Administrator for (2) years now and have had numerous challenges (i.e., "simple ones") that I could never get easy answers for from other sources. His 12 items of the "Daily Dozen" are great. I have found that I am doing probably only 4-5 of these. Without a senior administrator to learn from, I have had to learn NT 4.0 Server/Networks OJT. I especially was appreciative of his tip on creating a small boot partition. Having had to restore with the Emergency setup, this made the next one a cool breeze.

The section on TCP/IP was finally said in a way that I could grasp and utilize it fully (i.e., LAN Internet connectivity, DNS, DHCP, WINS)and put it to good use for our R&D.

This book makes everything I have been doing pull together. I would highly recommend this one to those of us with "short" experience with NT Server 4.0 networks. Thank you.