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| | | Location: Home » Wildlife Conservation » Finance » Investors and Markets: Portfolio Choices, Asset Prices, and Investment Advice (Princeton Lectures in Finance) | |
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| Investors and Markets: Portfolio Choices, Asset Prices, and Investment Advice (Princeton Lectures in Finance) | 
| Author: William F. Sharpe
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
Buy New: $17.96
You Save: $6.99 (28%)
New (18) from $17.96
Avg. Customer Rating:  3 reviews
Sales Rank: 16876
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 232
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6 x 0.6
ISBN: 0691138508
Dewey Decimal Number: 332.6
EAN: 9780691138503
ASIN: 0691138508
Publication Date: July 21, 2008
Shipping: Eligible for Super Saver Shipping
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
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| Customer Reviews:
 good new book for good price September 6, 2007
3 out of 12 found this review helpful
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 August 23, 2007
8 out of 12 found this review helpful
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" December 4, 2006
55 out of 69 found this review helpful
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-a-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.
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