Book Description
"This new edition of Active Portfolio Management continues the standard of excellence established in the first edition, with new and clear insights to help investment professionals."
-William E. Jacques, Partner and Chief Investment Officer, Martingale Asset Management.
"Active Portfolio Management offers investors an opportunity to better understand the balance between manager skill and portfolio risk. Both fundamental and quantitative investment managers will benefit from studying this updated edition by Grinold and Kahn."
-Scott Stewart, Portfolio Manager, Fidelity Select Equity ® Discipline
Co-Manager, Fidelity Freedom ® Funds.
"This Second edition will not remain on the shelf, but will be continually referenced by both novice and expert. There is a substantial expansion in both depth and breadth on the original. It clearly and concisely explains all aspects of the foundations and the latest thinking in active portfolio management."
-Eric N. Remole, Managing Director, Head of Global Structured Equity, Credit Suisse Asset Management.
Mathematically rigorous and meticulously organized, Active Portfolio Management broke new ground when it first became available to investment managers in 1994. By outlining an innovative process to uncover raw signals of asset returns, develop them into refined forecasts, then use those forecasts to construct portfolios of exceptional return and minimal risk, i.e., portfolios that consistently beat the market, this hallmark book helped thousands of investment managers. Active Portfolio Management, Second Edition, now sets the bar even higher. Like its predecessor, this volume details how to apply economics, econometrics, and operations research to solving practical investment problems, and uncovering superior profit opportunities. It outlines an active management framework that begins with a benchmark portfolio, then defines exceptional returns as they relate to that benchmark. Beyond the comprehensive treatment of the active management process covered previously, this new edition expands to cover asset allocation, long/short investing, information horizons, and other topics relevant today. It revisits a number of discussions from the first edition, shedding new light on some of today's most pressing issues, including risk, dispersion, market impact, and performance analysis, while providing empirical evidence where appropriate. The result is an updated, comprehensive set of strategic concepts and rules of thumb for guiding the process of-and increasing the profits from-active investment management.
Customer Reviews:
One to add to your reading list.......2007-06-30
I know many have this book and have never read it. Others read this book but never really understand it. However, if you can read it and understand it, it can offer a powerful tool for how to allocate capital. It actually is the basis for most indexing and quantitative methodologies. When applied to fundemental approaches to investment it can be quite powerful.
Sadly, though not enough money managers embrace what this book is trying to say with regards to risk and return.
Practical approach and mathematically rigorous at the same time.......2006-02-01
Excellent book for whom is looking for a practical approach that at the same time is presented through a rigorous mathematical methodology. The book is absolutely superior over the academic textbooks that usually limit themselves to CAPM and efficient market theory. Grinold and Kahn go much forward and at the same time had managed to clearly and meticulously show the CAPM model, its limitations and the more sophisticated tools developed from it. Beside of showing the active way of managing a portfolio, the serious mathematical presentations through which the different theories such as CAPM are described are very convincing of how difficult it could be to beat the market.
Theoretical framework with no practical examples........2005-01-20
There is important information in this book but most of us need to see numerical examples to reinforce theoretical concepts. This book really comes up short in this area. It provides some discussion with the formulas/equations it presents but is very incomplete in terms of worked out examples. Yes, including worked out examples might might mean a book three times as long, but the book would then be many, many times more useful to practitioners.
As it currently stands the book can only benefit the super-genius-theoretical types who do not need to see examples to understand OR someone who ALREADY really understands the concepts.
The book rather frequently presents variables or constants without explicitly defining them for the reader (it assumes we know what they mean from the accompanying discussion).
The book gives exercises, but without answers what good are these?
The one thing the book does is make you realize there is a lot you do not know. You can find ideas in portfolio management that exist by reading this book but if you are at all like me you are going to have to look elsewhere for the answers. I have had better luck with Google searches for stuff like Style Analysis.
The book shows how smart the authors are: they know stuff that must of us do not. Unfortunately this is the feeling I get as I read sections of their book. They intend to keep it this way. Bottom line: the book fails to bridge the gap between theory and practice.
This is the seminal text for Quantitative Finance.......2004-11-11
If you work for one of the top alpha quant shops (Barclays, Goldman, etc.), this text is a the proverbial must read. These are the guys that essentially invented quantitative finance in its modern form, building upon the [only somewhat applicable] concepts of Sharpe and Rosenberg and demonstrating how they can be harnassed to drive alpha. Anybody who has given this text a poor review obviously doesn't work in quantitative finance (chances are they're merely stock-pickers). If you want to understand how to drive alpha and beat the market, this text goes a lot further than explaining the simple concepts of information ratio and tracking error; instead, this book touches on the beauty of multi-factor models and covariance risk management.
Very boring and dry.......2004-10-05
This book is a funny phenomenon in itself: it seems that every portfolio manager keeps a copy on her desk, but nobody I've talked to likes the book, or has even really read it. I read it and had to struggle hard to go from one page to the next. It's one of the WORST books I've ever read in any field. The book attempts to give the reader a comprehensive overview of the portfolio management discipline. Unfortunately, it's extremely dry, to the point of boring the reader to death. A lot of pages are also wasted on topics of dubious value, while important subjects like global management is treated lightly. I highly recommend against this book. It's a waste of money.
Book Description
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.
Customer Reviews:
good new book for good price.......2007-09-06
good new book for good price. of all the books on the subject, this is by far the easiest to read.
Important read for professional investors.......2007-08-23
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.
"Normative Issues in a Positive Context".......2006-12-05
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.
Book Description
This is a thoroughly updated edition of Dynamic Asset Pricing Theory, the standard text for doctoral students and researchers on the theory of asset pricing and portfolio selection in multiperiod settings under uncertainty. The asset pricing results are based on the three increasingly restrictive assumptions: absence of arbitrage, single-agent optimality, and equilibrium. These results are unified with two key concepts, state prices and martingales. Technicalities are given relatively little emphasis, so as to draw connections between these concepts and to make plain the similarities between discrete and continuous-time models.
Readers will be particularly intrigued by this latest edition's most significant new feature: a chapter on corporate securities that offers alternative approaches to the valuation of corporate debt. Also, while much of the continuous-time portion of the theory is based on Brownian motion, this third edition introduces jumps--for example, those associated with Poisson arrivals--in order to accommodate surprise events such as bond defaults. Applications include term-structure models, derivative valuation, and hedging methods. Numerical methods covered include Monte Carlo simulation and finite-difference solutions for partial differential equations. Each chapter provides extensive problem exercises and notes to the literature. A system of appendixes reviews the necessary mathematical concepts. And references have been updated throughout. With this new edition, Dynamic Asset Pricing Theory remains at the head of the field.
Customer Reviews:
painful and obscure.......2005-12-24
The mathematics of finance is not trivial, but neither is it really all that difficult; nevertheless, Duffie works to make you think that it is.
I maintain a scale of good versus bad mathematics writing in my head, against which I calibrate books I read. This scale stretches from, at one end, the faculty of Moscow University, in particular Israel Gelfand, Vladimir Arnold and Andre Kolmogorov, all of whom manage to explain to me hard things so that they seem easy, to, at the other, Darrell Duffie.
Finance for economists.......2005-04-27
This book provides the most elegant and coherent synthesis of finance theory, in a complete markets and frictionless settings.
For the reader interested in the theoretical foundations of modern financial models, this book has three main advantages over many of its competitors:
- It clearly shows the link between modern finance theory and the 40-year old Arrow-Debreu model. As this book will make clear, financial assets can be viewed as "bundles" of Arrow-Debreu contingent goods, and pricing kernels are simply extensions of Arrow-Debreu contingent state prices.
- It bridges the gap between arbitrage models on one hand, and models based on consumption, optimization/dynamic programming and general equilibrium on the other hand. Absence of arbitrage guarantees the existence of a stochastic discount factor, or pricing kernel. Optimality implies that the stochastic discount factor must be equal to the investors' intertemporal marginal rate of substitution.
- It provides a unified treatment of discrete-time and continuous-time models. Many finance textbooks focus on the mathematic tools and emphasize the difference between continuous-time and discrete-time tools--usually at the expense of the economics underlying both types of models. In contrast Duffie's book emphasizes the conceptual unity between continuous-time and discrete-time asset pricing.
This book was written more for students and academics than for pratictioners. It is not a reference or a recipe book for traders and programmers. Several chapters are devoted to general-equilibrium models that pratictioners are not likely to find useful. However, the essentials of derivative asset pricing and the term structure are also covered. The latest edition even includes a chapter on corporate finance.
Finally, this book is pretty much self-contained. All the graduate-level math results used in the proofs are presented either in the main body of the book, or in appendices.
Demanding but rewarding!.......2003-09-30
First of all, this book is for people with advanced mathematical preparation. Courses in functional analysis, measure theory, stochastic calculus and vector space optimization are in my opinion required for a deep understanding of the material in the book. Fortunately, the appendices are very good and provide many things that can help someone to follow the book.
In the first four chapters the writer develops the discrete-time theory,in order to provide a better understanding of the underlying ideas which remain the same in the next chapters which deal with the continuous-time setting.
Although the book needs a lot of effort from the reader, it is unique in that can help you see beyond the mathematics. In other words it USES the mathematics and it isn't just a layout of theorems and proofs.
Of course it can't be compared with books like Hull as it isn't accessible to everyone. But someone with the mathematical preparation , who has read Hull , should buy this book and he will never regret it.
best intro of finance for math guys.......2001-12-03
I am taking a phd level course which uses this book. For math guys, SDE and MG theory covered in this book are fine, but it is still somekind of tricky to fill in some details of proof. As author said, the latter chapters are just repeating the first two chapters in a fancy math way. It is better to understand the first two chapters very well and then go further. For optimal portfolio and consumption part, I prefer Merton's notes and his CTF. Whatever, this book is great and very neat for integrating the whole theory.
A tricky book.......2001-11-03
This book, whilst being very impressive i didn't really find helpful as a learning tool. A good knowledge of the subject is required otherwise it is almost impossible to follow.
I'm studying a masters in finance, and would say it goes well beyond what we need to know for such a course. Maybe maths & finance students would cover things in this.
I am amazed that people actually use such a comllicated book in practice!!
Book Description
KEY MESSAGE:
Theory of Asset Pricing unifies the central tenets and techniques of asset valuation into a single, comprehensive resource that is ideal for the first PhD course in asset pricing.
Single-Period Portfolio Choice and Asset Pricing: Expected Utility and Risk Aversion; Mean-Variance Analysis; CAPM, Arbitrage, and Linear Factor Models; Consumption-Savings and State Pricing;
Multiperiod Consumption, Portfolio Choice, and Asset Pricing: A Multiperiod Discrete Time Model of Consupmtion; Multiperiod Market Equilibrium;
Contingent Claims Pricing: Basics of Derivative Pricing; Essentials of Diffusion Processes and Itô’s Lemma; Dynamic Hedging and PDE Valuation; Arbitrage, Martingales, Pricing Kernels; Mixing Diffusion and Jump Processes;
Asset Pricing in Continuous Time: Continuous-Time Consumption and Portfolio Choice; Equilibrium Asset Returns; Time-Inseparable Utility;
Additional Topics in Asset Pricing: Behavioral Finance and Asset Pricing; Asset Pricing with Differential Information; Models of the Term Structure of Interest Rates; Models of Default Risk.
MESSAGE: For all readers interested in asset valuation.
Book Description
This textbook takes the reader from the level of microeconomics principles through to modern asset pricing theory. Yvan Lengwiler elegantly links together issues that have in the past been the territory of general economic theorists on the one hand, and financial economists on the other.
In a sequence of carefully explained steps, the reader learns how the first welfare theorem is used in asset pricing theory. The book then moves on to explore Radner economies and von Neumann-Morgenstern decision theory, and this section culminates in Wilson's mutuality principle and the consumption-based CAPM. This is then put into a dynamic setting, and term structure models are introduced. The empirical shortcomings of the standard asset pricing models are extensively discussed, as is research from the last twenty years aimed at bringing theory in line with reality. The reader is brought up to date on the latest areas of concern, such as habit formation, the consequences of heterogeneity, demographic effects, changing tax regimes, market frictions, and the implications of prospect theory for asset pricing.
Aimed at masters or Ph.D. students specializing in financial economics, the book can also be used as a supplementary text for students of macroeconomics at this advanced level and will be of interest to finance professionals with a background in economics and mathematics. It includes problems (with solutions), and an accompanying website provides supporting material for lecturers.
Customer Reviews:
Excellent introduction to General Equiibrum Asset Pricing.......2005-06-23
This is not meant to be a textbook though there are some exercises following each chapter. The book is very easy to read and must be read as an uptodate introduction to General Equilibrium models and asset pricing as used in Financial Economics, Macro Economics etc. The ideas are developed without resorting to anything more than undergraduate level Linear Algebra, Optimization and Microeconomics. Reading this book has helped to put into perspective the financial economic theory learned over several courses and levels. The book should be compulsory reading for Graduate and Doctoral students.
Book Description
Asset pricing theory abounds with elegant mathematical models. The logic is so compelling that the models are widely used in policy, from banking, investments, and corporate finance to government. To what extent, however, can these models predict what actually happens in financial markets? In The Paradox of Asset Pricing, a leading financial researcher argues forcefully that the empirical record is weak at best. Peter Bossaerts undertakes the most thorough, technically sound investigation in many years into the scientific character of the pricing of financial assets. He probes this conundrum by modeling a decidedly volatile phenomenon that, he says, the world of finance has forgotten in its enthusiasm for the efficient markets hypothesis--speculation.
Bossaerts writes that the existing empirical evidence may be tainted by the assumptions needed to make sense of historical field data or by reanalysis of the same data. To address the first problem, he demonstrates that one central assumption--that markets are efficient processors of information, that risk is a knowable quantity, and so on--can be relaxed substantially while retaining core elements of the existing methodology. The new approach brings novel insights to old data. As for the second problem, he proposes that asset pricing theory be studied through experiments in which subjects trade purposely designed assets for real money. This book will be welcomed by finance scholars and all those math--and statistics-minded readers interested in knowing whether there is science beyond the mathematics of finance.
This book provided the foundation for subsequent journal articles that won two prestigious awards: the 2003 Journal of Financial Markets Best Paper Award and the 2004 Goldman Sachs Asset Management Best Research Paper for the Review of Finance.
Customer Reviews:
Serious Finance.......2007-06-28
This book and John Cochrane's "asset pricing" complement each other very well. Bossaerts discuss extremely important and overlooked issues in asset pricing theory and empirics in a very compelling way.
As a practitioner with an advanced degree, i found it a valuable read, and recomend "the paradox" to any serious finance practitioner or graduate student.
Let me end quoting the book (p.84):
"Asset pricing theory is both elegant and logically compelling. It is a nice piece of applied mathematics. But this is not suficient to conclude that it has scientic merit. To establish the latter, its predictions need to be verified in a variety of contexts."
Couldn't agree more.
Average customer rating:
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Dynamic Asset Allocation with Forwards and Futures
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Book Description
This is an advanced text on the theory of forward and futures markets which aims at providing readers with a comprehensive knowledge of how prices are established and evolve over time, what optimal strategies one can expect from the participants, what characterizes such markets and what major theoretical and practical differences distinguish futures from forward contracts. It should be of interest to students (majoring in finance with quantitative skills) academics (both theoreticians and empiricists), practitioners, and regulators.
Book Description
Every day, the financial markets bravely price trillions of dollars in such risky securities as stocks, bonds, options, futures, and derivatives. The systematic determination of their values--asset pricing--has developed dramatically in the last few years due to advances in financial theory and econometrics. In one of the most highly anticipated books in financial economics, John Cochrane unifies and brings this science up to date for the benefit of advanced students and professionals.
Cochrane traces the pricing of all assets back to a single idea--price equals expected discounted payoff--that captures the macroeconomic risks underlying each security's value. By using a single, stochastic discount factor rather than a separate set of tricks for each asset class, Cochrane builds a unified account of modern asset pricing. He presents applications to stocks, bonds, and options. Each model--consumption-based, CAPM, multifactor, term structure, and option pricing--is derived as a different specification of the discount factor.
The discount factor framework also leads to a state-space geometry for mean-variance frontiers and asset pricing models. It puts payoffs in different states of nature on the axes rather than mean and variance of return, leading to a new and conveniently linear geometrical representation of asset pricing ideas.
Cochrane approaches empirical work with the Generalized Method of Moments, which studies sample average prices and discounted payoffs to determine whether price does equal expected discounted payoff. He translates between the discount factor, GMM, and state-space language and the beta, mean-variance, and regression language common in empirical work and earlier theory. The book also includes a review of recent empirical work on return predictability, value and other puzzles in the cross section, and equity premium puzzles and their resolution.
Written to be a summary for academics and professionals as well as a textbook for advanced graduate students, this book condenses and advances recent scholarship in financial economics.
Customer Reviews:
I wanted to love this book.......2007-07-10
It's probably true that the first book you study about a subject inevitably determines your approach to it afterwards. My first book on asset pricing was Duffie's Dynamic Asset Pricing Theory (2nd ed), and it has perhaps forever biased my judgment. Given this caveat, I wanted to like this book. For econometricians, the stochastic discount approach is increasingly important, and Cochrane's articles are engaging and well written. But, no matter what the blurbs on the back cover of the book say, or what some Amazon reviewers claim, this is a flawed book. It's true that "the hurdles of asset pricing are really conceptual rather than mathematical" (last sentence in the book preface), but this is no excuse for being sloppy, and sloppiness in this book abounds. Assumptions are not clear; theorems are imprecisely stated. Continuous-time formulations pop up without explanation of the variables or of the motivation behind them. Expected-utility derivations are the main tool used by the author, but the connection between no-arbitrage, utility maximization and equilibrium are not clear, and one is led to think that the stochastic discount is unique to this line of reasoning. On the positive side, there are many interesting results and many intuitive explanations. My recommendation: i) read Duffie or Pliska first; ii) take the plunge and download Hansen & Richard's 1987 Econometrica paper (very dense); iii) read Cochrane, but reobtain all the results independently from what you have learned in in i) and ii).
The best.......2007-05-13
Upon recommendation by a friend of the author, I ordered this book through amazon. I read the entire book from cover to cover in a month. I am onto my second pass through the book.
Cochrane organizes pricing theories from CAPM to APT to derivative pricing, all of which I have learned through disparate sources, around a central theme: consumption based pricing theory. Then he goes on explaining the equivalence among these pricing theories, and indicate situations where these theories may best be used.
The author balances the theory with equal emphasis on empirical studies, from estimation methods to common pricing models, especially the Fama-French model. He also shares with us intuitive discussions of value factors, forecasting power of dividend/price ratios and the puzzling momentum factors.
What is especailly good about this book, I found, at least for myself, is how the author manages a casual style without losing rigor and focus. The author in 500+ pages review as well as explore vast amount of financial literature and present it to us in a clear and unified fashion. Another aspect I particularly like is that the author probably has students or people without finance ph.d.s in mind when he explains common but potentially confusing terminologies used in different segments of academic research.
Cochrane sketches out proofs for most of theorems and corollaries. Perhaps it is not the purpose of this book, and should not be required of it as such, that detail proofs be provided. Those can be found in references listed at the end of the book.
Overall I highly recommend this book to people who are interested in asset pricing theories as well as practice. Minimal advanced mathematics is sufficient, such as calculus and linear algebra.
Amazingly intuitive approach to write a text book.......2007-02-11
I agree with most reviewers who rate this book highly. In my opinion, the most outstanding quality of this book is the author's ability to make abstract materials very simple and intuitive without sacrificing the essential ideas of the subjects. The book is a perfect example of a good text book which is not intended to be written as a reference, although it easily has all the merits of being a good reference. (That said, to understand this book, readers need to have good mathematics and economics background to enjoy it.) I wish other books meant to be textbooks had this rare quality.
Very good.......2007-01-19
I took a Finance Ph.D. - level Asset Pricing course that used this book along with other sources and I'm quite happy with it. In particular, I enjoyed Ch 21 "Equity Premium puzzle and Consumption-Based Models". Some Matlab code for Campbell-Cochrane model is still available on my website (click on my name above).
My Favorite Asset Pricing Book.......2007-01-18
I have read most PhD-level textbooks on finance and Cochrane's is my favorite. Cochrane gives you the intuition using graphs as well as mathematical proofs for most of the results. The book is oriented toward training financial economists rather than financial mathematicians. If you are a financial economist and need to buy ONE book on asset pricing theory, buy Cochrane (the REVISED edition). If you are a financial mathematician and need to buy ONE book on asset pricing theory, buy Duffie. If you are smarter than the two guys I am talking about who want to buy ONE book only, then buy both! They are both helpful.
Book Description
Asset prices are driven by public news and information that is often dispersed among many market participants. These agents try to infer each other's information by analyzing price processes. In the past two decades, theoretical research in financial economics has significantly advanced our understanding of the informational aspects of price processes. This book provides a detailed and up-to-date survey of this important body of literature. The book begins by demonstrating how to model asymmetric information and higher-order knowledge. It then contrasts competitive and strategic equilibrium concepts under asymmetric information. It also illustrates the dependence of information efficiency and allocative efficiency on the security structure and the linkage between both efficiency concepts. No-Trade theorems and market breakdowns due to asymmetric information are then explained, and the existence of bubbles under symmetric and asymmetric information is investigated. The remainder of the survey is devoted to contrasting different market microstructure models that demonstrate how asymmetric information affects asset prices and traders' information , which provide a theoretical explanation for technical analysis and illustrate why some investors "chase the trend." The reader is then introduced to herding models and informational cascades, which can arise in a setting where agents' decision-making is sequential. The insights derived from herding models are used to provide rational explanations for stock market crashes. Models in which all traders are induced to search for the same piece of information are then presented to provide a deeper insight into Keynes' comparison of the stock market with a beauty contest. The book concludes with a brief summary of bank runs and their connection to financial crises.
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