Rating: 
Summary: Don't be scared
Review: When you pick up this book and look through it the graphs my scare you. Don't let your math phobia kick in. William Bernstein does a great job of walking you through each chapter. In fact at the end of one of the first chapters he tells you to put the book down for a few days and just digest the information. I would rate myself as at least an investor with moderate investing knowledge. I found this book helpful and the charts held validate the points Mr. Bernstein is making. I suspect I will refer to it often when I have a guestion about investing.
Rating:
Summary: Don't be scared
Review: When you pick up this book and look through it the graphs my scare you. Don't let your math phobia kick in. William Bernstein does a great job of walking you through each chapter. In fact at the end of one of the first chapters he tells you to put the book down for a few days and just digest the information. I would rate myself as at least an investor with moderate investing knowledge. I found this book helpful and the charts held validate the points Mr. Bernstein is making. I suspect I will refer to it often when I have a guestion about investing.
Rating:
Summary: Diversify Your Assets
Review: You can make a lot of money in the stock market. You can also lose a lot of money; this book explores modern thinking about the tradeoffs that determine risk and return in investing. Starting from the premise that statistical analysis provides the tools needed to evaluate risk, the author proceeds from there to present analyses based on modern research in economics and finance. The average investor may not like the authors premise, since it surmises that markets are reasonably efficient in pricing asssets and that the average investor faces very daunting odds when trying to outperform the market. The analyses fly in the face of most popularly available investing advice, which dwells on predicting trends, picking stocks and market timing. Most investors believe that they can predict the market to some degree (see Bernstein's "Four Pillars" book on overconfidence, or one of the previous reviewers), but Bernstein contends that the market performs in surprising ways that prevent the prediction of returns over short periods. The evidence for this unpredictability, provided in this and the author's other works (The "Pillars" book and his web site, The Efficient Frontier) is compelling. How much risk does the investor endure while modeling the market based on previous performance? Some aspects of risk and return for broadly defined asset classes are quantifiable, and these quantitations are discussed in the present volume. My criticisms are minor; I think the author foreshadows the text's math difficulty way too much (most of the public is math averse, I hear). You might read the "Pillars" book first if you are uncertain of your math skills ... anyone familiar with topics like covariance and autocorrellation will breeze through the math in this book. The disclaimer (after some buildup) of MVO backtesting in the middle of the book is a bit of a letdown, but the allocation strategies in the "Pillars" book undo that to some degree. Otherwise, an enthusiastic recommendation. I recommend that every investor read this or the "Pillars" book and apply these ideas carefully and objectively to their own investment strategy.
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