Preface -- Fraud, lies, and statistics -- The early history of modern financial economics -- The birth of the efficient market hypothesis -- Earlier views of market efficiency -- The impact of information and regulation on market efficiency -- Tests of the EMH -- Anomalies -- The capital asset pricing model -- Beyond the CAPM -- Conclusions -- References.

This book is about an intellectual fraud, one that has become part of legal doctrine that has greatly influenced decisions all the way up to the United States Supreme Court. The 'efficient market hypothesis' (EMH), born from the Random Walk theory, started out as an honest attempt to improve insights into how financial markets work, but eventually became almost a religion that every financial economist had to buy into, or risk professional crucifixion. The EMH began over a half century ago. It posits that share prices reflect all available market information, and that it is impossible to consistently outperform the market. This theory dominated research in the academic financial community from the outset, and has continued to do so for decades. Meanwhile, the evidence for above-average profit-making opportunities in the markets has been unfairly suppressed.Written for practitioners in the business, finance and legal industries, this book outlines the major issues that gave rise to the fraud, focusing on the role of statistics in the rise of what the authors call the 'New Finance.' It details the developments and results of the exclusion of other theories from efficient markets research and highlights the problems arising from a dogmatic adherence to EMH.

In the stories that make up Oblivion, David Foster Wallace joins the rawest, most naked humanity with the infinite involutions of self-consciousness -- a combination that is dazzlingly, uniquely his. These are worlds undreamt of by any other mind. Only David Foster Wallace could convey a father's desperate loneliness by way of his son's daydreaming through a teacher's homicidal breakdown (The Soul Is Not a Smithy). Or could explore the deepest and most hilarious aspects of creativity by delineating the office politics surrounding a magazine profile of an artist who produces miniature sculptures in an anatomically inconceivable way (The Suffering Channel). Or capture the ache of love's breakdown in the painfully polite apologies of a man who believes his wife is hallucinating the sound of his snoring (Oblivion). Each of these stories is a complete world, as fully imagined as most entire novels, at once preposterously surreal and painfully immediate.

National Book Award Finalist: “This man’s ideas may be the most influential, not to say controversial, of the second half of the twentieth century.”—Columbus Dispatch At the heart of this classic, seminal book is Julian Jaynes's still-controversial thesis that human consciousness did not begin far back in animal evolution but instead is a learned process that came about only three thousand years ago and is still developing. The implications of this revolutionary scientific paradigm extend into virtually every aspect of our psychology, our history and culture, our religion—and indeed our future. “Don’t be put off by the academic title of Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Its prose is always lucid and often lyrical…he unfolds his case with the utmost intellectual rigor.”—The New York Times “When Julian Jaynes . . . speculates that until late in the twentieth millennium BC men had no consciousness but were automatically obeying the voices of the gods, we are astounded but compelled to follow this remarkable thesis.”—John Updike, The New Yorker “He is as startling as Freud was in The Interpretation of Dreams, and Jaynes is equally as adept at forcing a new view of known human behavior.”—American Journal of Psychiatry

This international bestseller, which foreshadowed a market crash, explains why it could happen again if we don't act now. Fractal geometry is the mathematics of roughness: how to reduce the outline of a jagged leaf or static in a computer connection to a few simple mathematical properties. With his fractal tools, Mandelbrot has got to the bottom of how financial markets really work. He finds they have a shifting sense of time and wild behaviour that makes them volatile, dangerous - and beautiful. In his models, the complex gyrations of the FTSE 100 and exchange rates can be reduced to straightforward formulae that yield a much more accurate description of the risks involved.

Focusing on market microstructure, Harris (chief economist, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission) introduces the practices and regulations governing stock trading markets. Writing to be understandable to the lay reader, he examines the structure of trading, puts forward an economic theory of trading, discusses speculative trading strategies, explores liquidity and volatility, and considers the evaluation of trader performance. Annotation (c)2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).

This book provides a comprehensive treatment of the important aspects of investment theory, security analysis, and portfolio selection, with a quantitative emphasis not to be found in most other investment texts.The statistical analysis framework of markets and institutions in the book meets the need for advanced undergraduates and graduate students in quantitative disciplines, who wish to apply their craft to the world of investments. In addition, entrepreneurs will find the volume to be especially useful. It also contains a clearly detailed explanation of many recent developments in portfolio and capital market theory as well as a thorough procedural discussion of security analysis. Professionals preparing for the CPA, CFA, and or CFP examinations will also benefit from a close scrutiny of the many problems following each chapter.The level of difficulty progresses through the textbook with more advanced treatment appearing in the latter sections of each chapter, and the last chapters of the volume.