Capital Ideas: The Improbable Origins of Modern Wall Street |  | Author: Peter L. Bernstein
Publisher: Wiley
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Rating:  19 reviews
Sales Rank: 266973
Media: Paperback
Pages: 360
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.1
Dimensions (in): 8.3 x 6 x 0.9
ISBN: 0471731749
Dewey Decimal Number: 332.632
EAN: 9780471731740
ASIN: 0471731749
Publication Date: June 20, 2005
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Product Description
Capital Ideas traces the origins of modern Wall Street, from the pioneering work of early scholars and the development of new theories in risk, valuation, and investment returns, to the actual implementation of these theories in the real world of investment management. Bernstein brings to life a variety of brilliant academics who have contributed to modern investment theory over the years: Louis Bachelier, Harry Markowitz, William Sharpe, Fischer Black, Myron Scholes, Robert Merton, Franco Modigliani, and Merton Miller. Filled with in-depth insights and timeless advice, Capital Ideas reveals how the unique contributions of these talented individuals profoundly changed the practice of investment management as we know it today.
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 19
An excellent overview of finance to 1998 October 4, 2009
Lewis W. (Mexico City)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
For obvious reasons i.e. "how did we get into this mess", the origins of finance have come under scrutiny. This book provides an excellent historical perspective. It is not a heavy mathematical read, but more of a historic narrative, written from the perspective of an expert market practitioner. It leaves off in the late 1990's and therefore does not include the more recent excesses, but is a very good overview of the key developments that is well worth reading, even if you disagree with the direction finance has taken, it is useful to know how it got there.
 The Power of Ideas October 25, 2008
Etienne ROLLAND-PIEGUE (Tokyo, Japan)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
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 were not those pathetic figures that generations of MBA students tried to emulate? What if the unsung heroes of the times were instead the professors and ivory tower academics who wrote those students' textbooks? Finance professors are usually not held in very high esteem: their economics colleagues won't share office space with them, their practically-minded students deride them for not practicing what they are teaching, and the general public considers any accident on the stock market as proof of the flaws in their theories.
Peter Bernstein's book pays due respect to their profession. It focusses on a small group of innovators who created finance as an academic discipline, and transformed Wall Street and the world along the way. Published in 1992, Capital Ideas starts and ends with two turning points in the history of modern finance: the crisis of October 1974, which saw the culmination of the worst bear market in common stocks since the Great Crash of 1929, and the stock market crash of October 1987, in which hundreds of billions of dollars were wiped out in a few hours.
Financial innovation was blamed on those two occasions, and finance specialists were castigated as sorcerer's apprentices. But for Bernstein, finance is more a solution than a problem, and the answer to the risk of innovation getting out of control is still more innovation. Had it not been for the crisis of 1974, few financial practitioners would have paid attention to the ideas on portfolio selection and risk management that had been stirring in the ivory towers for some twenty years. And putting the blame of the 1987 crash on portfolio insurance, as the commission chaired by Nicholas Brady did, is compared by the author to a proposal to slow down the train, when efforts should focus on improving the quality of the roadbed.
Finance had difficulty establishing itself as an academic discipline. It was taught mostly in business administration departments, not in economics faculties. Even in business schools such as Harvard, the investment course in the 1950s attracted so few students that it was taught at noontime so that it would not take up precious classroom space at prime time. Finance attracted marginal individuals, the kind of persons that would be described nowadays as nerds, with a taste for crunching numbers and dabbling with computer mainframes. Only a few of them had formal training in economics. The discipline flourished in only a handful of US universities where the talent of a few individuals made a difference and where business school professors did talk to their colleagues in the economics department: Chicago, MIT, and a few other places.
The body of knowledge that forms the core of the discipline-what Bernstein refers to as Capital Ideas- was conceived in the space of only twenty-one years, from 1952 to 1973. In short, it is contained in Harry Markowitz's work on portfolio selection, Franco Modigliani's and Merton Miller's revolutionary views about corporate finance and the behavior of markets, the Capital Asset Pricing Model developed by Sharpe, Treynor and a few others, Eugene Fama's explication of the Efficient Market Hypothesis, and the option pricing model of Fischer Black, Myron Scholes, and Robert C. Merton.
When the discipline was developed, many economists regarded the stock market as a side-show in the economic system, not worthy of serious attention. Even Milton Friedman, who sat on Markowitz's dissertation committee, reflected the prejudices of the profession when he declared: "Harry, I don't see anything wrong with the math here, but I have a problem. This isn't a dissertation about economics. It's not math, it's not economics, it's not even business administration." And it was something completely new and unrelated to previous work: Markowitz's seminal paper on Portfolio Selection, that brought him fame and a Nobel Prize, lists only three references to other works in its bibliography. One of the most fundamental paper by Jack Treynor, that laid the groundwork for the CAPM, wasn't even published.
There were some exceptions. The most famous was Paul Samuelson, known for his textbook first published in 1948 and who made so many contributions to the economics discipline that the Nobel jury had trouble highlighting only a few when they awarded him the prize in 1970. Although Samuelson was Keynes' most distinguished disciple, he rejected Keynes' own view of the market as little more than a casino, and he saw the stock market as a central institution as well as a source of fascinating intellectual puzzles. Another economist with a keen interest for financial markets was James Tobin, who spent most of his career at Yale except for a brief stint at he Council of Economic Advisers that began with the following dialogue when President Kennedy offered him the job:
- I'm afraid you got the wrong guy, Mr. President. I'm an ivory-tower economist.
- That's the best kind. I'll be an ivory-tower president.
- That's the best kind, Mr. President.
The book is very rich in anecdotes and personal details on the academic founders of modern finance, most of whom were interviewed at length by the author. It requires no prior knowledge of the field, although knowing one's betas from one's alphas will help the reader go through the material. My own exposure to theoretical finance has been very limited, but having done the maths once on the CAPM or the Modigliani-Miller theorem helped me get through the relevant chapters, whereas the last chapters on option pricing theory or continuous time finance are way beyond my grasp and could only be understood metaphorically. But the Capital Ideas and the difference that they made are just too important to be left ignored, and Peter Bernstein has made a great job of explaining them to the general public.
An excellent book July 18, 2007
GORDON (ARIZONA)
0 out of 11 found this review helpful
This book should be on your book shelf. I would critize the book in that although it recommends against portfolios of individual securities it does not warn the investor against professional portfolio managers.
By way of example:Piscaqua Research in a study covering the period 1987-96 found that only 10 out of 145 major pension funds, or just seven percent, out performed a portfolio consisting of a simple 60%/40% mix of the S&P 500 index and the Lehman Bond index respectively.
Or is it logical I ask for you to believe that you can predict which actively managed funds will out perform, or are you overconfident of your skills? If you are trying to find the great fund managers who will out perform in the future ask yourself: what am I going to do differently in terms of identifying the future winning fund managers, than did the pension plans and their advisors? And if you are not going to something different what logic is there in playing a game at which others with superior resources have consistently failed?
If you a really serious in finding an investment technique that will provide you with reasonable return with less risk I suggest the following little book. This is a little book that I have written and contains the essential of how to invest. Just click on the title to find the book. How to Make Money in the Stock Market-Buy 2,500 Different Stocks-Pay no Commission
The Theory and Practice of Finance in the nutshell January 1, 2007
Ekarat Tantawichet (Los Angeles, CA)
15 out of 28 found this review helpful
This is a required book for any student of finance. It captures all the essence of finance theory in the most intuitive fashion. The very special treat of this book is the ending chapters: how people on Wall Street apply the theory to the real world--and how they make money.
I would assign this book for any finance major student.
If you read this book and would like to see exactly and in more technical details what Bernstein is talking in this book, try these two books:
(i) The Theory of Business Finance: A Book of Readings (Hardcover)
by Stephen H. Archer (Author) and
(ii) Modern Developments in Investment Management: A Book of Readings (Paperback)
by James H. Lorie (Compiler)
They are compilations of the original papers published by those founders of modern finance.
Buy these used, out of print, and old books (yet they are a pilar of what Wall Street has been built on). They are cheap in price but invaluatble in values.
Demystifies investing and the stock market December 5, 2006
B. Young
10 out of 25 found this review helpful
This is a very well written book which looks at the stock market from a statistical and empirical perspective. It presents overwhelming scientific evidence that it is very unlikely that stock picking adds any value. He presents very interesting evidence that mutual fund managers and portfolio managers of actively managed portfolios on average do not earn their fees.
Despite this clear evidence the asset management industry continues to grow and flourish. This book taught me to manage my own money and to seek to reduce fees to the bare minimum. If more people understood this basic message they would get better returns on their hard earned money.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 19
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