Strategic Asset Allocation

Rating:
Summary: Not for the average investor
Review: I bought this book based on a brief review in the Economist. It was way over my head. I'm a serious individual investor with training in math but found the tone of the book to be fairly esoteric and of little practical use.

Rating:
Summary: Too theoretical
Review: This 200-page volume is better described as an academic monograph that extends the classic mean-variance asset allocation model in a multiple-period setting, hence the marketing claim "portfolio choice for long-term investors." The book will be interesting to those studying finance Ph.D. looking for a good survey -- the latter chapters resember papers in academic journals -- but is entirely impractical to the average investor or even, IMHO, most money managers. Much of the stuff cannot even be implemented on your Excel spreadsheet! So what you have is a very boring and inaccessible book that won't teach you a thing about how to practice strategic asset allocation.

Rating:
Summary: Too theoretical
Review: This 200-page volume is better described as an academic monograph that extends the classic mean-variance asset allocation model in a multiple-period setting, hence the marketing claim "portfolio choice for long-term investors." The book will be interesting to those studying finance Ph.D. looking for a good survey -- the latter chapters resember papers in academic journals -- but is entirely impractical to the average investor or even, IMHO, most money managers. Much of the stuff cannot even be implemented on your Excel spreadsheet! So what you have is a very boring and inaccessible book that won't teach you a thing about how to practice strategic asset allocation.

Rating:
Summary: Just very good
Review: This book sums up recent research on the "strategic" (as opposed to "tactical", see eg Wai Lee's recent good book) asset allocation decisions - those of people wanting to design a portfolio for the very long term.

I am a practitioner, but this is not a practicioners' book on many counts: some of the formalism is hard (eg chap 5 on continuous-time models), it does not include rules of thumb, its basic framework requires a lot of effort to translate into numeric advice (10% cash, 40% bonds, 50% equity or suchlike). A PFP system based on this is some way off (also because real estate is left out).

Yet: (a) the book saves you a lot of time catching up with the literature; (b) it does dispel some bad criticisms of modern portfolio theory, especially in the first two chapters which are extremely useful as a reminder of basic dynamic theory; (c) it does throw in real-world considerations such as why do we advise older people to hold more conservative portfolios, what does labor income do to the basic model, why are bonds advised at all, the "asset allocation puzzle" etc.

You end up your quest for knowledge much the wiser having read this - and my quest was not effortless. I read this book (actually the Web version) while on a summer vacation. Got up every morning at 7 and worked about one hour at a time, first reading, the following day taking notes. In two weeks I sweated it out. It was worth it, and I bought the book too (the physical book is much leaner than the printout).

Rating:
Summary: Very nice, theoretical book
Review: This is a relatively good book on the consumption/investment problem for long-term investing.

To know whether it is appropriate for you, you need to realize that the "problem" the book addresses is the (now classical) consumption/investment problem from the standpoint of financial economics.

I would say it is not a practioner's book....mostly because practitioners usually do not have the specific background in math and economics, not because the ideas cannot be applied.

The ideas you will take away are at a very fundamental level. Not at the "how to" level.

I agree that most of what is covered in the book cannot be implemented in Excel. However, that statement applies to most of the interesting (and practical) problems in finance.

No one who uses Amazon's "search" feature to examine the book will be disappointed. If you bought this based on title alone, you could easily be let down.

Rating:
Summary: Very nice, theoretical book
Review: This is a relatively good book on the consumption/investment problem for long-term investing.

To know whether it is appropriate for you, you need to realize that the "problem" the book addresses is the (now classical) consumption/investment problem from the standpoint of financial economics.

I would say it is not a practioner's book....mostly because practitioners usually do not have the specific background in math and economics, not because the ideas cannot be applied.

The ideas you will take away are at a very fundamental level. Not at the "how to" level.

I agree that most of what is covered in the book cannot be implemented in Excel. However, that statement applies to most of the interesting (and practical) problems in finance.

No one who uses Amazon's "search" feature to examine the book will be disappointed. If you bought this based on title alone, you could easily be let down.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent reference for the study of long-term investors
Review: Two Harvard professors collect their own and other's excellent papers on the behaviour of long-term intevestors. They suggest theoretical and empirical results for the choice of a portfolio assets for retirement savings. It is clearly explained by mathematical and empirical methods. Readers can save time to read lots of papers related to this topic.