The Education of a Speculator
Author: Victor Niederhoffer
List Price: $19.95
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ISBN: 0471249483
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons (February, 1998)
Sales Rank: 16,069
Average Customer Rating: 3.31 out of 5
Customer Reviews
Rating: 3 out of 5
The Education of a Reader...
If you are looking for great insight or help on trading or investing, you won't find it in The Education of Speculator. It is an entertaining book, but definitely not educational. Victor Niederhoffer provides his history plus the history of his family interwoven with a few bits of market strategy and techniques. If you enjoy reading about what life experiences compels a man to speculate in the markets, read his book. If you want to learn to speculate, don't with his book.
Rating: 5 out of 5
Best market book ever.
Victor Niederhoffer is one of the true originals in the investment world. Born to a poor Jewish family in Brooklyn, he became world champion of the ultra-WASP game of squash and then, as an academic, he challenged the prevailing "random walk" theory in papers that are still widely cited as classics. He is in the thick of the debates among today's statistical stars. Not content to stay in the ivory tower, he raised his first trading stake from the mergers-and-acquisitions business he founded, which was the first to concentrate on selling small businesses --and went on to achieve the best record of any hedge fund, in all periods.Here's a guy who has a lot to tell about trading, business and life, and the style to tell it well. Education of a Speculator gives the reader a unique combination of quantitative sophistication, street wisdom and a scholarly grasp of market history. The bibliography alone is worth the price of the book. EdSpec is so rich that you come back to it again and again. There is simply no book like this one. I've looked.
If you want to know how the market really works, read Education of a Speculator. If you want to read about a real man, Vic's father Artie -- scholar, athlete, cop, loving father -- read Education of a Speculator. If you want to know how a great mind approaches the day-to-day fray of trading, read Education of a Speculator. Anybody who feels nothing on reading Niederhoffer's rags-to-riches story, who thinks it's nothing but egomania, doesn't have a heart.
Rating: 4 out of 5
Stocks, commodoties and almost everything else
The Education of a Speculator is a long, sometimes meandering account of the life of speculator Victor Niederhoffer. There is no particular order to this book, at least that I could discern; Niederhoffer jumps from topic to topic, going backwards and forwards in time. The style is almost stream of consciousness, with the main subject of finance digressing into topics as diverse as biology, music and squash (the author is a serious player of squash and other racquet sports). In addition to Niederhoffer's unconventional style of writing, the book assumes a fairly high level of knowledge regarding financial markets. Those (such as this reviewer) who are not well versed in the kind of articles, charts and data found in the Wall Street Journal or Barron's will often find themselves in way over their heads. For all this, I still recommend The Education of a Speculator, even to people not especially interested in the world of investing. Victor Niederhoffer is what may be called a holistic or macro thinker; he could also be called a Renaissance man. He has knowledge of many subjects and sees the connecting links between all events, objects and disciplines. He may not be right about everything, but his perspective is always interesting, intelligent and original. He combines the streetwise instincts of Brooklyn, where he grew up, with the scholarly mindset of Harvard, where he both graduated from and taught. As for investing itself, Niederhoffer, like many speculators (at one point he describes the overlapping definitions of an investor, a speculator and a gambler), has had many ups and downs in his life. When this book was written, he was at the top of his game; shortly afterwards he was wiped out. That, of course, was several years ago and he is still active as a writer (he has recently written a new book) and investor. I have always been fascinated with the world of investing, especially the kind of volatile speculating engaged in by people like Niederhoffer. Even if you don't understand all the details and nuances, the book conveys the dangers and excitement of this unpredictable universe. The author has spent many years compiling and analyzing data concerning markets, and he discusses how difficult it is to make predictions based on past performance. It is easy to look at a chart and, after the fact, describe how stocks or commodities moved in a logical, predictable manner. Often when you try to apply any seemingly logical system using real money, the results are disastrous. Niederhoffer seems to conclude that markets are paradoxical -they are both logical and illogical; sometimes they follow patterns but sometimes they are chaotic. And, most importantly, we can never be sure when order or chaos will prevail. If there is one overall lesson we can take from The Education of a Speculator, it is probably something like this -reality is almost infinitely complex with every part connected to every other part, the whole thing organized by some vast pattern that can only occasionally be comprehended. Similar Products
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