Investors and Markets: Portfolio Choices, Asset Prices, and Investment Advice (Princeton Lectures in Finance)
by William F. Sharpe
|
List Price: $24.95
Our Price: $16.95
Your Save: $ 8.00 ( 32% )
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Princeton University Press
|
Average Customer Rating:  
|
|
Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 332.6
EAN: 9780691138503
ISBN: 0691138508
Label: Princeton University Press
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 232
Publication Date: 2008-07-21
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Studio: Princeton University Press
|
|
|
|
|
|
Spotlight customer reviews:
|
Customer Rating:
Summary: good new book for good price
Comment: good new book for good price. of all the books on the subject, this is by far the easiest to read.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Important read for professional investors
Comment: An important, relatively recent book by William Sharpe, a Nobel Prize winning economist and Stanford business prof. Not for the rank-and-file investor; but much useful information for pros and teachers of finance. Last chapter contains a summary of very useful advice suitable for anyone who invests in stocks.
Customer Rating:
Summary: "Normative Issues in a Positive Context"
Comment: William Sharpe, who really needs no introduction, has made major contributions to some of the most influential discoveries in financial economics. From his parsimonious diagonal model which simplified the use of Markowitz' normative (prescribing how investors should behave) mean/variance approach to portfolio choice to the positive (describing how investors actually behave) Capital Asset Pricing Model, Professor Sharpe clearly approaches -- even from his earliest investigations - financial economics from a pragmatic perspective. Of course that work contributed to his selection in 1990 as a co-recipient (along with Harry Markowitz and Merton Miller) of The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel.
In addition to his academic pursuits, Professor Sharpe has also been commercially successful, as a RAND economist, and as President, Chairman and/or Director of several enterprises related to investments. Of course, practitioners may know him best for his famous "reward-to-variability" ratio which we all know as the Sharpe ratio. Professor Sharpe has also made important fundamental contributions to options valuation, asset allocation implementation, and returns-based style analysis.
His pioneering books are standard text assignments for both undergraduate and graduate students of finance; these include Portfolio Theory and Capital Markets (McGraw-Hill, 1970 and 2000), Asset Allocation Tools (Scientific Press, 1987), Fundamentals of Investments (with Gordon J. Alexander and Jeffrey Bailey, Prentice-Hall, 2000), Investments (with Gordon J. Alexander and Jeffrey Bailey, Prentice-Hall, 1999). Now we are fortunate as an industry to have Professor Sharpe's latest book, Investors and Markets: Portfolio Choices, Asset Prices and Investment Advice (Princeton University Press, 2007), available.
Investors and Markets is the culmination of a series of three lectures Professor Sharpe gave at Princeton University in May, 2004. The lectures, titled "Asset Prices and Portfolio Choice" are designed to help individual investors make good saving and investment decisions, and Professor Sharpe is the first author I have seen to treat both asset pricing and portfolio choice as a single subject in an attempt to do so. The book is also a nice departure from the well-worn mean/variance framework (which places restrictions on beliefs), relying instead on the state/preference approach (which places restrictions instead on tastes) originally developed by Kenneth Arrow and Gerard Debreu. Although it relies on a discrete-time formulation, one advantage of the state/space framework is that it accommodates both consumption preferences and production outputs. Because there are (literally) an infinite number of future states of the world, closed-form derivations are nearly impossible and simulation is required in this context if we are to achieve equilibrium. To do so, Professor Sharpe built a simulation program called APSIM (Asset Pricing and Portfolio Choice Simulator), which was not available a couple of years ago when the lectures happened but since then he has made freely available on his website, [...].
Professor Sharpe's original Princeton Lectures are organized into 1) Equilibrium, in a single-period setting with homogeneity of investor expectations, 2) Diversity, in a setting where investors have heterogeneous expectations, and 3) Protection, a world in which investors have access to spanning instruments such as principal-protected notes. This is also largely the sequence of the book, which is organized into discussions of equilibrium, preferences and prices in chapters 1-4, which basically comprise Lecture 1; positions (reflecting preferences), and predictions (reflecting disagreement among investors) in chapters five and six, material primarily from Lecture 2, and protection and advice in chapters seven and eight, which is composed mainly of material from Lectures 2 and 3. The book concludes with four simple recommendations for personal investment: diversify as broadly as possible; economize on unnecessary costs; incorporate the circumstances and preferences of the individual client in the portfolio decision; and contextualize portfolio choice vis-à-vis asset pricing, keeping in mind the distinction between investing versus betting, desire for principal protection, and the potential trading impact of the investor when he or she eventually requires liquidity.
In Investors and Markets, Professor Sharpe is "primarily concerned with helping individual investors make good saving and investment decisions - usually with the assistance of professionals such as financial planners, mutual fund managers, advisory services, and personal asset managers." Although this book may prove tough going for the layperson, all professionals in the asset management industry would do well by their clients to buy, read and re-read it ... the clients will certainly benefit.
|
|
|
Editorial Reviews:
|
Customer Rating:
Summary: good new book for good price
Comment: good new book for good price. of all the books on the subject, this is by far the easiest to read.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Important read for professional investors
Comment: An important, relatively recent book by William Sharpe, a Nobel Prize winning economist and Stanford business prof. Not for the rank-and-file investor; but much useful information for pros and teachers of finance. Last chapter contains a summary of very useful advice suitable for anyone who invests in stocks.
Customer Rating:
Summary: "Normative Issues in a Positive Context"
Comment: William Sharpe, who really needs no introduction, has made major contributions to some of the most influential discoveries in financial economics. From his parsimonious diagonal model which simplified the use of Markowitz' normative (prescribing how investors should behave) mean/variance approach to portfolio choice to the positive (describing how investors actually behave) Capital Asset Pricing Model, Professor Sharpe clearly approaches -- even from his earliest investigations - financial economics from a pragmatic perspective. Of course that work contributed to his selection in 1990 as a co-recipient (along with Harry Markowitz and Merton Miller) of The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel.
In addition to his academic pursuits, Professor Sharpe has also been commercially successful, as a RAND economist, and as President, Chairman and/or Director of several enterprises related to investments. Of course, practitioners may know him best for his famous "reward-to-variability" ratio which we all know as the Sharpe ratio. Professor Sharpe has also made important fundamental contributions to options valuation, asset allocation implementation, and returns-based style analysis.
His pioneering books are standard text assignments for both undergraduate and graduate students of finance; these include Portfolio Theory and Capital Markets (McGraw-Hill, 1970 and 2000), Asset Allocation Tools (Scientific Press, 1987), Fundamentals of Investments (with Gordon J. Alexander and Jeffrey Bailey, Prentice-Hall, 2000), Investments (with Gordon J. Alexander and Jeffrey Bailey, Prentice-Hall, 1999). Now we are fortunate as an industry to have Professor Sharpe's latest book, Investors and Markets: Portfolio Choices, Asset Prices and Investment Advice (Princeton University Press, 2007), available.
Investors and Markets is the culmination of a series of three lectures Professor Sharpe gave at Princeton University in May, 2004. The lectures, titled "Asset Prices and Portfolio Choice" are designed to help individual investors make good saving and investment decisions, and Professor Sharpe is the first author I have seen to treat both asset pricing and portfolio choice as a single subject in an attempt to do so. The book is also a nice departure from the well-worn mean/variance framework (which places restrictions on beliefs), relying instead on the state/preference approach (which places restrictions instead on tastes) originally developed by Kenneth Arrow and Gerard Debreu. Although it relies on a discrete-time formulation, one advantage of the state/space framework is that it accommodates both consumption preferences and production outputs. Because there are (literally) an infinite number of future states of the world, closed-form derivations are nearly impossible and simulation is required in this context if we are to achieve equilibrium. To do so, Professor Sharpe built a simulation program called APSIM (Asset Pricing and Portfolio Choice Simulator), which was not available a couple of years ago when the lectures happened but since then he has made freely available on his website, [...].
Professor Sharpe's original Princeton Lectures are organized into 1) Equilibrium, in a single-period setting with homogeneity of investor expectations, 2) Diversity, in a setting where investors have heterogeneous expectations, and 3) Protection, a world in which investors have access to spanning instruments such as principal-protected notes. This is also largely the sequence of the book, which is organized into discussions of equilibrium, preferences and prices in chapters 1-4, which basically comprise Lecture 1; positions (reflecting preferences), and predictions (reflecting disagreement among investors) in chapters five and six, material primarily from Lecture 2, and protection and advice in chapters seven and eight, which is composed mainly of material from Lectures 2 and 3. The book concludes with four simple recommendations for personal investment: diversify as broadly as possible; economize on unnecessary costs; incorporate the circumstances and preferences of the individual client in the portfolio decision; and contextualize portfolio choice vis-à-vis asset pricing, keeping in mind the distinction between investing versus betting, desire for principal protection, and the potential trading impact of the investor when he or she eventually requires liquidity.
In Investors and Markets, Professor Sharpe is "primarily concerned with helping individual investors make good saving and investment decisions - usually with the assistance of professionals such as financial planners, mutual fund managers, advisory services, and personal asset managers." Although this book may prove tough going for the layperson, all professionals in the asset management industry would do well by their clients to buy, read and re-read it ... the clients will certainly benefit.
In Investors and Markets, Nobel Prize-winning financial economist William Sharpe shows that investment professionals cannot make good portfolio choices unless they understand the determinants of asset prices. But until now asset-price analysis has largely been inaccessible to everyone except PhDs in financial economics. In this book, Sharpe changes that by setting out his state-of-the-art approach to asset pricing in a nonmathematical form that will be comprehensible to a broad range of investment professionals, including investment advisors, money managers, and financial analysts. Bridging the gap between the best financial theory and investment practice, Investors and Markets will help investment professionals make better portfolio choices by being smarter about asset prices. Based on Sharpe's Princeton Lectures in Finance, Investors and Markets presents a method of analyzing asset prices that accounts for the real behavior of investors. Sharpe makes this technique accessible through a new, one-of-a-kind computer program (available for free on his Web site, at http://www.stanford.edu/~wfsharpe/apsim/index.html) that enables users to create virtual markets, setting the starting conditions and then allowing trading until equilibrium is reached and trading stops. Program users can then analyze the final portfolios and asset prices, see expected returns, and measure risk. In addition to popularizing the most sophisticated form of asset-price analysis, Investors and Markets summarizes much of Sharpe's most important previous work and reflects a lifetime of thinking about investing by one of the leading minds in financial economics. Any serious investment professional will benefit from Sharpe's unique insights.
|
|
|
|
|
|
| eFinancialDistrict Market Place |
| Forbes Investment Newsletters | Up 60.1% in 2003 - Subscribe to Forbes Special Situation Survey and get a FREE 16 page report. Find more info - click here! | |
| TaxBrain Online Tax Service | Would You Like Your Money 2-Day? Get started now! TaxBrain Online | |
| Planet Loan | Refinance and Save on Your Current Mortgage. Get Cashout for home improvement, pay off your debt. CLICK HERE NOW! | |
|
What is eFinancialDistrict Market Place?
eFinancialDistrict is a full-featured finance and accounting portal, and this book store is a part of it.
Since the book store selectively offers finance and accounting books and other related products,
our guess is that you are also interested in various finance and banking services.
This market place lists links to those services. Half of services offer you free information for you
to find out more about those services. Of course, it is completely free to request information.
If you find something interesting, just click on it! |
|
|
