Estimated read time: 2-3 minutes
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It's been awhile since I've put a book down and thought, "Life is too short to keep reading this." I'm slightly embarrassed to admit to you that I didn't finish this book. I wanted to. I wanted to understand what's happening in the market, in world markets, in the economy now with all of its current challenges, but this author is either too smart or too swollen with his own field of study that he cannot write for the average reader.
The author says that he is writing the book for investors and policy makers, but I think he is writing for people with finance degrees, although I'm not sure they would enjoy it either. He talks about anomalies in the market that start out as what he calls "noise" and then develop into transformations. He tries to explain how he looks for signals in the noise. I read the chapter twice and still don't get it. I kept reading until I got about half-way through, then put the book down and admitted that I didn't understand a word I was reading.
Here's the thing - the book bored me so much that I found myself looking for typos, and finding them. I thought, "You're so smart that you're writing over my head but you can't edit out typos?!" And then when he quoted Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, I actually had the thought, "How sad is it when the Fed Chairman is the most animated and interesting speaker in a book!" This is how paranoid I was when I finished - I actually purchased and read Benjamin Graham's book so often referred to by Warren Buffet, The Intelligent Investor. I enjoyed it thoroughly and learned from it. But as for Mohamed El-Erian's bestseller, When Markets Collide, I cannot recommend it.
