Books : Capital Ideas: The Improbable Origins of Modern Wall Street
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by: Peter L. Bernstein
Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 332
EAN: 9780029030127
ISBN: 0029030129
Label: Free Press
Manufacturer: Free Press
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 352
Publication Date: March 29, 1993
Publisher: Free Press
Sales Rank: 298947
Studio: Free Press
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Editorial Review:
Product Description:
When the 1974 recession hit Wall Street, investment professionals desperately turned to academia to help regain the value of their clients' holdings. Bernstein shows how Wall Street finally embraced the advences wrought in academic seminars and technical journals tht ultimately transformed the art of investing.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - The Power of Ideas
The popular literature about the world of investment in the 1980s carries titles that reflect those events: Bonfire of the Vanities, Barbarians at the Gates, The Predators' Ball, and Liars' Poker. The main characters are arrogant, greedy, cynical, and shady. The movie Wall Street summed it all up: "greed is good", the address by corporate raider Gordon Gekko to a crowd of investors, is the claim that came to epitomize the zeitgeist.
But what if the real heroes of the stock market frenzy ... Read More
Rating:  - Thorough introduction to financial theater
A great book to establish an understanding for how the current investment strategies came about. Petere Bernstein did a great job of introducing mathematical masterminds such as Louis Bachelier; the inventor of stochastic analysis concepts, the birth of Dow Jones, the creation of S&P 500 index by Alfred Cowles, Portfolio Selection by Harry Markowitz and many other financial and statistical intellects.
Rating:  - Flawed
Again it is evident that acedemicians, whatever their field, will tend to embrace elegant, complex but flawed theories over simpler and more sound ones.
The Graham and Dodd disciples (e.g. Warren Buffett) have shown that they can consistently beat the market indices by simply buying good companies at good prices.
Rating: - A disappointing book...
I borrowed the book from my library (fortunately I didn't buy
it) with great expectations. What I found it to be was a 300+
page infomercial for Academic Finance. Bernstein is not
merely a cheerleader of Modern Academic Finance, but a Worshipper.
His gods are messrs Markowitz, Sharpe et al. I returned the book
after reading about 1/2 of it.
The book is disappointing on several fronts :
- It is completely biased in its treatment.
- There ... Read More
Rating: - Excellent Timeline
Dr. Bernstein immerses readers in lucid tales about the evolution of the capital market theories that helped shape Wall Street's mindscape. Along the way he introduces the names and faces that delivered to the investment community ideas about Brownian Motion, the Efficient Frontier, the Separation Theorem, the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM), the Capital Structure Puzzle, the Black - Scholes Option Pricing Model and portfolio insurance strategies, to name a few.
One of the interesting factors ... Read More
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