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Rating: 
Summary: What could have been explained in 50 pages...
Review: Grinhold and Kahn's concept of the Information Ratio being dependant on skill (i.e. the correlation between expected outperformance and real outperformance) and sqrt. breath (i.e. the number of securities a manager follows and the number of times he rebalances his portfolio) is theoretically excellent. However, in the real world these correlations and even breath are hard to measure and mostly propriatary to the manager. Yet G&K go on for 500 pages on quantitive techniques that might be interesting for those with a PhD in Risk Management.For the average (practical) person interested in portfolio management this book is way too academic, using some 10 Greek letters and Cov, Std per page (and I'm not even talking about the technical appendices), making it very hard to read and comprehend.
Rating: 
Summary: This is the seminal text for Quantitative Finance
Review: If you work for one of the top alpha quant shops (Barclays, Goldman, etc.), this text is a the proverbial must read. These are the guys that essentially invented quantitative finance in its modern form, building upon the [only somewhat applicable] concepts of Sharpe and Rosenberg and demonstrating how they can be harnassed to drive alpha. Anybody who has given this text a poor review obviously doesn't work in quantitative finance (chances are they're merely stock-pickers). If you want to understand how to drive alpha and beat the market, this text goes a lot further than explaining the simple concepts of information ratio and tracking error; instead, this book touches on the beauty of multi-factor models and covariance risk management.
Rating:
Summary: Clear, efficient and useful
Review: The book carefully develops the concepts of Portfolio Theory. Topics include: risk aversion, the Capital Market Line, the Markowitz Portfolio Selection Model, the Capital Asset Pricing Model, beta, market equilibrium, etc. Subsequent chapters cover fixed income securities, security analysis, derivatives and active portfolio management. The book is extremely detailed and very well written. It covers more than the basics. It includes a variety of advanced theories and describes recent academic research. A excellent choice !
Rating: 
Summary: Theoretical framework with no practical examples.
Review: There is important information in this book but most of us need to see numerical examples to reinforce theoretical concepts. This book really comes up short in this area. It provides some discussion with the formulas/equations it presents but is very incomplete in terms of worked out examples. Yes, including worked out examples might might mean a book three times as long, but the book would then be many, many times more useful to practitioners.
As it currently stands the book can only benefit the super-genius-theoretical types who do not need to see examples to understand OR someone who ALREADY really understands the concepts.
The book rather frequently presents variables or constants without explicitly defining them for the reader (it assumes we know what they mean from the accompanying discussion).
The book gives exercises, but without answers what good are these?
The one thing the book does is make you realize there is a lot you do not know. You can find ideas in portfolio management that exist by reading this book but if you are at all like me you are going to have to look elsewhere for the answers. I have had better luck with Google searches for stuff like Style Analysis.
The book shows how smart the authors are: they know stuff that must of us do not. Unfortunately this is the feeling I get as I read sections of their book. They intend to keep it this way. Bottom line: the book fails to bridge the gap between theory and practice.
Rating:
Summary: Very boring and dry
Review: This book is a funny phenomenon in itself: it seems that every portfolio manager keeps a copy on her desk, but nobody I've talked to likes the book, or has even really read it. I read it and had to struggle hard to go from one page to the next. It's one of the WORST books I've ever read in any field. The book attempts to give the reader a comprehensive overview of the portfolio management discipline. Unfortunately, it's extremely dry, to the point of boring the reader to death. A lot of pages are also wasted on topics of dubious value, while important subjects like global management is treated lightly. I highly recommend against this book. It's a waste of money.
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