Rating: 
Summary: Incomplete, not rigorous
Review: The book was incomplete and not sufficiently rigorous. Covers same ground as many other, better-written books.D.O.
Rating: 
Summary: Not for beginners
Review: The whole theoretical part is fine and very advanced, including time-series stuff.
May be the book should be used by PhD candidates or by professionals as a new fresh set of eyes to understand the (complicated)asset pricing problem.
Rating: 
Summary: Substandard
Review: This book is like a bad sequel. It seems like an attempt to copy the better work of others, but the result is poor due to the author's poor understanding of the subject. There are so many mistakes; it is difficult to believe this wasn't written by an undergraduate student as a failed attempt to clone a textbook. Compare this book with anything else on the finance shelf of a good bookstore and give this a miss.
Rating: 
Summary: Modern finance in a book finally
Review: This book presents finance in the modern way: p=E(mx). After having read it, the reader should be able to understand the papers currently published in the field. That's the big advantage of the book, because, in this sense, it is better than Duffie's, Dothan's or Ingersoll's. Be advised that the book is not worried about technicallities or math, but the economics underlying the models in it. However some deep discussions assumes the reader knows: mean-variance frontier, (C)CAPM, APT, and so on, including the several empirical tests already performed on these models and their results. This is not always true, and the reader can easily get lost. The author uses graphs to clarify the ideas. It is not always successful. Many graphs are confusing. For instance, the author assumes the reader knows how to add and to subtract vectors graphically, which is really easy if you knew that in advance, but difficult to figure out if you do not. Also there are several minor mistakes the reader should take care of. I am sure the second edition of the book will correct those mistakes and will make the book a lot better. I think the part talking about the GMM econometrics very clear and that helps a lot to implement the models presented in it. I recommend the book, mainly because there is no other book treating modern finance like that. Once you get used to it, you'll see the book is not difficult and very useful.
Rating: 
Summary: A nice intuitive, chatty textbook
Review: This is a book designed for advanced MBAs (who want to know what current academic research in finance is about) or 1st-Y PhD specializing in Finance. It covers many theoretical approaches in finance and points out the connections between them, providing a unified framework. This is very helpful as there was prior to this little understanding between old-CAPM types and more recent general equilibrium modelling. Now, if you want to go deeply into pure theory (esp. continuous time) modelling, go to Duffie, and good luck to understand it. There is a brief coverage of options and a very clear presentation of basic bond pricing and term structure. The book also covers thoroughly empirical testing, especially GMM. The author shows how easy all this is to do, and points out many tricks and traps, providing intuition for how the various methods work. This part is I think quite original and very insightful. There are also two surveys, on predictability of returns and the infamous equity premium puzzle, which are also very nice. I love the informal style, with a rather chatty presentation, lots of pictures and intuition, and a short chapter format that makes it easy to read a little part.
The downside: sometimes the chatty style is not so clear and precise. Also, you'll have to go back and forth in the book since it is a lot about connections between the various approaches, which is good (that's the real plus of the book, but at first it can be a bit annoying). To sum up, that's the book I'd recommand to sbd who has had some economics and some quantitative background and wants to really understand what people are doing. (I guess the other reviewers prefer the 'theorem-proof' style of Duffie, who doesn't explain where the economics is - I'm quite surprised by their opinions, which seem to me rather rare).
Rating:
Summary: Stolen material
Review: Trite and tired material.
Looks like large sections
have been cut and pasted by other,
better texts. Numerous mistakes, in grammar
and math appear throughout the book. Better sources for all this material
are readily available.
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