Reviews for Wall Street: Its Mysteries Revealed - Its Secrets Exposed

The average rating for Wall Street: Its Mysteries Revealed - Its Secrets Exposed based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2010-01-12 00:00:00 Joshua Pierson I had high hopes for this book, but I got much less than I had hoped. For a "theory" book, one would already have expected that there would be some detachment from the real world - the industry. Usually a useful theory although omits a lot of minor details, in large it should still try to capture a significant portion of the characteristics of the subject. This book though failed to do so, the theory usually based on some much too idealized view of the real market, and omitted significant detail that actually renders the model wrong in the second or millisecond level scale. For me it is far more important to get some semi usable result from a more realistic model than a clean mathematical result from a unrealistically simplified one. Structure-wise, I often felt very hard to understand the point the author makes. Often, the author would list a bunch of research that other people already did, it may be related but there often was no concrete point being made. I would not recommend this book to any serious practitioners that want to get some real insights from several days of reading.

Review # 2 was written on 2010-01-12 00:00:00 Augier Raphael This little book, published in 1871, describes the functioning of the first great capital market at the time when money first began to flow quickly and easily across distances and borders to wherever it would be most profitable to those who controlled it. (I suspect the telegraph played a role in this transformation.) Bagehot confined himself to describing the workings of the actual money market, intentionally keeping clear of economic theory. The fact he named the book after the specific street where the activities took place is indicative. Although conditions have changed greatly since he wrote, the book presents a good introduction to the mechanisms of capital. The latter part of the book points out weaknesses in the then current workings of the money market that resulted from London having become an international centre for capital and it proposes methods of safe guarding against a panic. I think it demonstrates his astuteness that he was arguing this in 1871 two years before "The Panic of 1873" that triggered the "Long Depression", the first global depression, lasting twenty years. He was one of those uncommon writers who are able to express complexity clearly. I wish I could find somebody writing about money today with his skill as a writer, his knowledge (before becoming a journalist he had worked as a banker) and his scrupulous avoidance of economic dogma.