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A Mathematician Plays The Stock Market | 
 enlarge | Author: John Allen Paulos
Publisher: Basic Books
Category: Book
List Price: $14.95
Buy New: $3.48
You Save: $11.47 (77%)
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Rating:  85 reviews
Sales Rank: 57663
Media: Paperback
Pages: 224
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 5.3 x 0.6
ISBN: 0465054811
Dewey Decimal Number: 332
EAN: 9780465054817
ASIN: 0465054811
Publication Date: May 4, 2004
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Ships from PA, 15-day return for any reason. Fast Shipping, thank you for your order
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Product Description
From America's liveliest writer on mathematics, a witty and insightful book on the stock market and the irrepressibility of our dreams of wealth. In A Mathematician Plays the Stock Market best-selling author John Allen Paulos demonstrates what the tools of mathematics can tell us about the vagaries of the stock market. Employing his trademark stories, vignettes, paradoxes, and puzzles (and even a film treatment), Paulos addresses every thinking reader's curiosity about the market: Is it efficient? Is it rational? Is there anything to technical analysis, fundamental analysis, and other supposedly time-tested methods of picking stocks? How can one quantify risk? What are the most common scams? What light do fractals, network theory, and common psychological foibles shed on investor behavior? Are there any approaches to investing that truly outperform the major indexes? Can a deeper knowledge of mathematics help beat the odds? All of these questions are explored with the engaging erudition that made Paulos's A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper and Innumeracy favorites with both armchair mathematicians and readers who want to think like them. Paulos also shares the cautionary tale of his own long and disastrous love affair with WorldCom. In the tradition of Burton Malkiel's A Random Walk Down Wall Street and Jeremy Siegel's Stocks for the Long Run, this wry and illuminating book is for anyone, investor or not, who follows the markets-or knows someone who does.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 80 more reviews...
 Won't make you rich, but will make you think -- and laugh. December 22, 2008
LOTONtech (www.lotontech.com)
I really like this book, and you might too, if you treat it as what it is -- a series of (usually amusing) observations and anecdotes about how stock prices change as a result of peoples perceptions about how stock prices change.
Here are some of the gems:
ON GREED: The guy who found a $5 casino chip, and through a series of bets built up a multi-million pound fortune; then lost it all on the final spin of the wheel, and when reporting back to his wife said that he had "only lost $5".
ON FUNDAMENTALS: Worldcom had an extremely low P/E (which we would naively assume to be a good thing) just before going bankrupt.
Paulos draws mathematical analogies occasionally, but not as often as you might think from the title. It is very accessible to non-mathematicians; who can take the examples at face value, laugh at them, and try to learn something from them.
This book won't make you rich, but it will make you think -- and laugh.
Tony Loton, author --
DON'T LOSE MONEY!: (in the Stock Markets)
Stock Fundamentals On Trial: Do Dividend Yield, P/E and PEG Really Work?
 Another Random Book November 2, 2008
Stephen Boone (dallas, tx USA)
If you like math games and paradoxes this is a fun book. Unfortunately it claims to be about the market and, like every math and physics guy's book about the market it claims that stock movements are completely random. Of course, that is because all of these people insist on using selection criteria that tells them nothing about the stock they are buying. Most bought during the bubble, lost money and therefore the market must be random or they -- smart people that they are -- would have figured it out. They never seem to have thought about what business their company was in or looked at things like long term earnings and dividend payments. They obsess with prices or simply buy stocks at random from tips. HINT: If a company makes and sells things you can check on like cheese or refrigerators and has been paying dividends steadily they MUST be making money. Following numbers only like P/e ratios, price etc can be like picking your dates by their phone numbers. Instead, actually go look at them. Same with stocks. Stick with what you can see and looks good and stay away from ones that smell bad.
Well written, witty August 4, 2008
harry57 (florida)
I enjoyed reading this book. The information was presented in a way that the non-mathematically inclined person can understand.
 bad May 19, 2008
Michael E. Budzisz
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
This is poor.
Some of his arguments are just wrong. Look at his calculations on pages 25-27. I had to read it 3x to make sure he was this far-off. His calculations are wrong, and therefore his conclusions are junk.
 Easy read with nuggets of wisdom March 28, 2008
David Balding (Mission Viejo, CA USA)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Good little romp through probabilities and human nature and the stock markets. Author does not take himself too serious and, refreshingly, does not come across as the "Fount of All Knowledge" as most business and investing book authors. Sets up the key questions and critiques the common wisdom answers.
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