Rating: 
Summary: Great but for one point.
Review: A fascinating work from which much can be gleaned -- entertaining as well.
The only thing I take issue with is Mahar's references to succesful "market timing" by investors who pulled money out of the market before 1999. For investors like Warren Buffett, it would be more accurately described as "market pricing" -- that is, when an investment's price has risen significantly beyond its intrinsic value, it is an appropriate time to sell. As it is said: "price is what you pay, value is what you get."
Rating:
Summary: Non Fiction Bonfire of the Vanities for the New Millenium
Review: A great non fiction account of the rise, rise and fall of the boom market written with a novelist's eye for detail. Peppered with lively anecdotes and colorful commentary about the decade's leading financial figures, Mahar offers incisive analysis about what drove the boom and advice on how to survive the aftermath. What's more, BULL helps you take stock of your own portfolio. It was enormously helpful and an unexpectdly good read. I only put it down to share passages with my husband.
Rating: 
Summary: A FUN READ, BUT . . . .
Review: An entertaining and fun read, but far from the "real truth" of what was really going on, just like the explanations of this period using nonsense wave theories are too for example. To really understand what drove the boom of the 1980s and 1990s there is nothing that even comes close to Daniel Arnold's THE GREAT BUST AHEAD. He accounts with scary accuracy for every boom and bust from 1920 until today, not just one period - something no one else has ever done. The boom of the 1980s and 1990s of Mahar's book were so easily accounted for by Arnold, both in magnitude and duration. Sadly, Arnold now just as accurately forecasts a catastrophic thirteen year depression that is now just a few years away. Read Arnold too (with some urgency) if you want to survive the next ten to twenty years, as well as really understand what produces our boom and bust financial cycles.
Rating: 
Summary: A Cautionary Tale for Investors
Review: Beginning investors are sometimes told a few simple maxims to help them manage their portfolios. Never time the market. Buy and hold. Expect 10% annual return on stocks held for the long run (usually defined as seven to ten years).Maggie Mahar has done a service to these investors by showing how little evidence there is to support these maxims or, at the least, how easily they can be distorted. She does this by revisiting the last boom and showing it in historical perspective. Contrary to the conventional wisdom that most index funds will grow 10% annually so long as they are held around ten years, Mahar shows that the U.S. stock market - upon which most index funds closely track - has gone through several periods nearly twenty years long with little to no annual growth. Contrary to the conventional wisdom that you can't time the market, Mahar says that most savvy investors - including buy-and-hold strategists such as Warren Buffett - do time their investments, and feel no compunction about getting out of a severely over-inflated market. Mahar's history is also instructive in showing how industry leaders and government officials were complicit in allowing shoddy accounting and other questionable practices to contribute to the breakneck market. Rather than a rational market in which everyone can expect to be a winner given enough time (seven to ten years), "Bull" shows that investors must still exercise caution even when following the few simple investing guidelines that most people do not question.
Rating:
Summary: BULL! THE SAVVIEST, MOST ENJOYABLE FINANCIAL BOOK OF 2003
Review: BULL!: A History of the Boom, 1982-1999: What Drove the Breakneck Market--and What Every Investor Needs to Know about Financial Cycles by Maggie Mahar. This is the perfect complement to Bill Bonner's "Financial Reckoning." Smart and savvy like Bonner is, Mahar tells the story of the most magnificent bull market in U.S. history is a way you can use. She gives you a context for going forward. Whatever else you do, do not go back into the market without it. BULL! reads like a novel. In her singular, rare and literate voice, Mahar tells a tense, teaming, human story that would satisfy the most exigent Dickens fan, but it isn't a story. This is the tale we all lived through. In essence, it is the
piece-by-piece re-framing of the sixties ideal of participatory democracy. "Power to the People" helped fuel the civil rights movement and end the Vietnam War. It put the resources of a room-size mainframe at the fingertips of a personal
computer owner. It had already democratized credit a decade earlier: millions of Visa card owners who would never have been able to get a banker to return a phone call could to get instant loans anywhere, anytime, without even asking. They bought themselves computers and when brokerage firms began selling their wares over the Internet, they were ready and
willing to buy. Mahar chronicles the latest Bull Market from the inside out. We are there as Power-to-the-People migrates from politics to the pocketbook to big-time Wall Street, when the confluence of laws, attitudes and technology gives birth to the spectacular fireworks of "The People's Market." She is at once
objective, comprehensive, at ease and master of her subject, and
honestly compassionate. In other words, you won't have any trouble following the course of this breakneck market and she will never leave you in the lurch. She will, for example, manage to explain stock options and their powerful role in all this without making you feel stupid or bored. If you were
in the market, they affected you and she will show you how. BULL is your story, the one you couldn't figure out. If you were a grass root supporter in the 60s and early 70s (I still have my button) it's very likely that you became an "individual investor" in the stock market sometime during the years 1982 and 1999, thereby claiming your right
to vote in, take your pick, a "global plebiscite" (Citicorp chairman Walter Wriston) or a national lottery. As Mahar shows, the democratization of the financial world happened in large part because people took to betting on the future on their own or through pension and mutual funds. That is to say, they stopped looking at real assets, profits and losses. (The market was moving too fast anyway, too
much research could make you dizzy). Instead, they started staring at single number, the company price which was moving across their screens, and which could easily be 100 times more per share than what the company was earning, if indeed there were earnings. They assessed the value of a company's
stock solely by its ticker price: It was worth whatever somebody would pay for it, in sum the collective judgment of millions of people. It was a thoroughly American, optimistic approach. New economy, new guideposts. You might have been a father with kids and a mortgage who one day discovered you could earn more in a day online than in a month on the job. Yours would likely be some of the votes that turned AOL into a stock that traded at 236 times EXPECTED earnings and earned it in a place in the S&P 500, knocking
out (TK.) You weren't alone and you weren't necessarily a big
risk-taker,Mahar points out. Fantasy and greed played roles in the bull market, but smaller than you think. There was also enormous anxiety and it's that anxiety, subtle and extremely hard to isolate and detail, that Mahar brings out and empathizes with. You'll probably hear echoes of your own story in BULL in the single
mother who mistook the market for a piggy bank, or the housewife who became an addicted gambler who couldn't take her eyes off the ticker, or the father who allowed himself to be goaded into competing with his dot.com son When the insiders saw the free fall coming, they bailed out, Mahar says clearly and flatly. Many stayed. Why didn't you, read me, read us, whoever we are, cut and run. Here, Mahar reminds us of what else was going on, who else was in the picture. There was, for example, the benign, large-as-life face of Magellan Fund's Peter Lynch speaking in countless full-page ads, warning that social
Security might not be there for you at 65. Better start saving.
Where? In the equity markets. There was also Washington. Contrary to what reasonably
might be expected, Senators Bill Bradley and Joseph Lieberman went to bat for the corporations, tirelessly working to help them hide the cost of options, thus masking the real financial state of the companies you owned,and freeing stock prices to soar even higher. Then Alan Greenspan chimed in,
blessing the bull with the stupefying oxymoron "rational exuberance,"his euphemism for the casino circus behavior of millions of small-time gamblers who were betting their nest eggs. Throughout it all, there was the 24/7 real-time financial media stream, endlessly reflecting you reflecting
them. It's this world of mirrors that created the Big Bull and that Mahar is able to make objectively coherent. Yet, and this is her strength, she never loses sight of or overlooks the human factor, the "individual," where ever she finds him. Why did so many people stay till the bitter end of the party? Ignorance? Self-interest? Paralysis? Addiction to excitement? Who's to
blame? What's to blame? Nobody made me buy into the market anymore than anybody forced me to smoke,but the message of this book is that you don't have to put yourself in a corner and compulsively re-tally and re-live your losses anymore. I don't know how Mahar did it but I ended up satisfied. I made mistakes but instead of obsessively re-seeing where, I now see why, and that makes all the
difference. I can learn. So will you. By the way, for the future, Mahar suggests reading up on China, Russia and natural resources.
Rating:
Summary: Investing Without Bubbles
Review: Bull, Maggie Mahar's sharp and very readable new history of the Bull Market,offers investors smart views of why the bubble happened, why it burst, who got hurt, who didn't, and where to invest now, keeping in mind financial cycles and important emerging markets like those in China and elsewhere in Asia. Mahar's engaging style and telling anecdotes give readers a bounty of knowledge that's both impressive and fresh. Not just another ain't-it-a-shame account of the bursting bubble, Bull analyzes the hows and whys. At the same time, it's fun to read. Should be a top pick for holiday presents.
Rating:
Summary: only great bull markets really matter
Review: excellent, accurate and an easy read.
Rating:
Summary: Captivating & Informative--Best I've read on the Bull Market
Review: I finished Bull! in two days, and I enjoyed every page. The problem that I've had with most books on economic history or investing (and particularly those, such as this one, that include considerable economic detail) is that they are miserable to plow through, and are invariably filled with dry and seemingly superfluous detail. This book is different. Mahar mixes witty anecdotes with incisive analysis, and her claims about investing are offered in intelligent often playful prose, surrounded with a copious amount of recent historical material. Even well known stock-market figures--like Warren Buffet--look new here: we get a sense of why they acted as they did, and often a hint of what they may have been thinking. Recommended for anyone interested in learning more about investing, uncovering what the last bull run was all about, or meeting some of the major Wall Street players that were made into near-celebrities.
Rating:
Summary: HISTORY KEEPS REPEATING ITSELF. BUT IS ANYONE LEARNING?
Review: I found this to be an exciting read, very readable and full of wit. I wish I had read a book like this earlier before I bought and held all my stocks during the high tech stock wreck that brought my investments crashing down about 35% of their value. I bought and held Lucent, AT & T, and many favorites that past authors would have placed in the "buy & hold" part of ones portfolio. Perhaps the rules have changed and we did not want to change with the times. This book gives a great reason to monitor a portfolio (and money managers) on a regular and ongoing basis. This book, in some ways, reminds me of the somewhat unregulated "penny stock boom" in the 1970's and early 1980's. I was investing during that time. I remember how penny stocks were pumped and dumped, and most of the underwriter firms were closed down. The sadest story was in the paper was about "OTC NET" (I believe that was the underwriter's firm). They had done so many crooked public offerings that one on the top executives was sentenced to prison. It seems the more things change the more they stay the same. After reading "Bull!" I went to my home financial library (I must have hundreds of financicial books in my study) and got my very worn and read copy of HOW TO MAKE MONEY IN PENNY STOCKS: THE ULTIMATE SOLUTION FOR THE SMALL INVESTOR by Jim Scott. I reread it before writing this review, and it is absoluting amazing to me that the fall of the high tech penny stocks in the 1970's and early 1980's was so much like the recent tech wreck. You would think the SEC would have become better in regulating these small and sometimes "paper only companies" (those companies not yet operating or making money). Especially after almost 30 years the SEC could have created safer safeguards to protect investors. But during the same time as the tech wrech I was following another writer in the financial world named R. Max Bowser. He has been investing and writing a funny-to-read, but easy-to-understand investment newsletter for somewhere close to 30 years. During the past three or so years, his newsletters remarks about the "invisible stock market," which he indicates are the small profitable companies that Wall Street and the news do not cover or write about. Those are the companies that most often make profits in times of a down market. He keeps a running portfolio that he updates at the end of the year and publishes in a forthcoming newsletter of the following year. I have read his three books several times and I believe his books have worked out most mistakes that the high tech investors got caught in. His system has you selling half each stock when it doubles, and sell the balance if it backs down a certain percentage. He also warns when to sell out of a stock completely based on his own warning signals, company earnings, insider trading as well as other indicators. His followers apparantly made money in the tech wreck mess. One of my favorite books by Mr. Bowser is MAKING DOLLARS WITH PENNIES: HOW THE SMALL INVESTER CAN BEAT THE WIZARDS ON WALL STREET. He apparently had so many readers make money using his investment system that he includes their stories in another book, PENNY STOCK WINNERS: TRUE STORIES OF SUCCESSFUL INVESTORS. But I was amazed when Mr. Bowser came out with a $5,000 guarantee that if you follow his investment system and lose money, he will pay the reader (investor) $5,000. So, I am taking his 30 years of wisom and exerience to the test, and I am going through that book page by page, playing his easy-to-understand investment system (see GUARANTEED PROFITS WITH SMALL STOCKS: THE ONLY INVESTMENT SYSTEM THAT COMES WITH A 5,000 GUARANTEE). If I lose money on his system, I will at least have $5,000 to show for it. For all investors, my final thought is to learn that the old rule of "buy and hold" may not be the new way to invest for the long run.
Rating:
Summary: Right up there!
Review: I have a bookcase groaning with investment books and I rate Mahar's book up with the works of Ben Graham and Peter Lynch. A very well written book that shines a light into many a dark corner. I defy even the most well-read and battle-hardened investor to come away denying that Mahar has produced a book cheap at twice the price.
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