Bull!: A History of the Boom, 1982-1999: What Drove the Breakneck Market--And What Every Investor Needs to Know about Financi

On the surface, this is a history of the stock market over the past 20 years. Like most economic history, one would expect to be bored to tears. The book adds a couple doses of financial theory (also "Ho Hum") and somehow manages to be a delightfully insightful and interesting read. The 400+ pages just flew by. There's lots of interesting historical annecdotes included: 1) The bears who get killed for mistiming their predictions. (The bull isn't done until the last bear is gored) 2) How the Blodgets of the world were created by a system that encouraged cooking the books and an abdication of responsibility. (Mahar covers the laws that created this environment, and those politicians that pushed for them) 3) The ups and down of particular investors as they deal with the bull and inevitable bear. In addition, several insights come out: 1) Buy and Hold Equities isn't all that it's cracked up to be. 2) Not everyone belongs in the market. Indeed, many investing professionals make their money on Wall Street, but invest it on Main Street. (Harder to lose money on a house) 3) Decreasing spending or increasing earning potential can go a long way. 4) It is easier to pick trends than timing them. There are a couple attacks on her thinking: 1) She cites the virtues of market timing, but market timing really isn't that easy. If it were, we'd all be doing it. 2) She cites many folks who called the end of the bull right. In a sea of information overload, it isn't that easy to find these people and understand their arguments. (There's always convincing bears) 3) There are many instances of "If you only followed Xs advice from Day Y..." which is tough to check. Is that a valid trend, or are the dates (especially the end dates) picked just to amplify a point? (It's always possible to find a 5, 10 or 20 year period to prove a point) That said, the book is an important one, both from a historical point of view, and to improve one's investing.

I have read many self-help financial books over the years, but I must place this one right at the top. Maggie Mahar is a gifted writer and tells her tale with wit and economy. The result is a lot more readable than your typical financial book, but more than that, it exposes the fallacy of many old bromides that I had read in all those other self-help screeds (like "buy and hold"). In fact, as she traces the history of the long bull market that began in 1982 and culminated with the late 90's mania for tech stocks with triple digit PE's, I recognized myself among the many fools who bought into the madness and squandered much of their retirement nest eggs.I found the most valuable investment advice in the book to be the musings of a few experienced money managers who had been through the long and punishing bear market of 1968-1982, and who saw the tech wreck coming. The reminiscences of these investment advisers--people like Gail Dudack, Steve Leuthold, Jean Marie Eveillard and Peter Bernstein--are worth the price of the book many times over. For people who are looking for a self-help investment primer that doesn't sugarcoat the risks, this book is the real deal, without the BULL!

Incredible book. After reading this, you will never look at CNBC, the SEC, mutual funds... in short Wall Street the same again. Nor will you be so willing to accept the hype and promises being offered today. The book moves fast and the anecdotes are great. Mahar's style flows so well that I read 3/4 of the book the first day. If you want a history lesson to help you avoid the mistakes of the past, then you should read this book.

BULL!: A History of the Boom, 1982-1999: What Drove the Breakneck Market--and What Every Investor Needs to Know about Financial Cycles by Maggie Mahar.This is the perfect complement to Bill Bonner's "Financial Reckoning." Smart and savvy like Bonner is, Mahar tells the story of the most magnificent bull market in U.S. history is a way you can use. She gives you a context for going forward. Whatever else you do, do not go back into the market without it.BULL! reads like a novel. In her singular, rare and literate voice, Mahar tells a tense, teaming, human story that would satisfy the most exigent Dickens fan, but it isn't a story.This is the tale we all lived through. In essence, it is the piece-by-piece re-framing of the sixties ideal of participatory democracy. "Power to the People" helped fuel the civil rights movement and end the Vietnam War. It put the resources of a room-size mainframe at the fingertips of a personal computer owner. It had already democratized credit a decade earlier: millions of Visa card owners who would never have been able to get a banker to return a phone call could to get instant loans anywhere, anytime, without even asking. They bought themselves computers and when brokerage firms began selling their wares over the Internet, they were ready and willing to buy.Mahar chronicles the latest Bull Market from the inside out. We are there as Power-to-the-People migrates from politics to the pocketbook to big-time Wall Street, when the confluence of laws, attitudes and technology gives birth to the spectacular fireworks of "The People's Market." She is at once objective, comprehensive, at ease and master of her subject, and honestly compassionate. In other words, you won't have any trouble following the course of this breakneck market and she will never leave you in the lurch. She will, for example, manage to explain stock options and their powerful role in all this without making you feel stupid or bored. If you were in the market, they affected you and she will show you how. BULL is your story, the one you couldn't figure out.If you were a grass root supporter in the 60s and early 70s (I still have my button) it's very likely that you became an "individual investor" in the stock market sometime during the years 1982 and 1999, thereby claiming your right to vote in, take your pick, a "global plebiscite" (Citicorp chairman Walter Wriston) or a national lottery.As Mahar shows, the democratization of the financial world happened in large part because people took to betting on the future on their own or through pension and mutual funds. That is to say, they stopped looking at real assets, profits and losses. (The market was moving too fast anyway, too much research could make you dizzy). Instead, they started staring at single number, the company price which was moving across their screens, and which could easily be 100 times more per share than what the company was earning, if indeed there were earnings. They asses

I finished Bull! in two days, and I enjoyed every page. The problem that I've had with most books on economic history or investing (and particularly those, such as this one, that include considerable economic detail) is that they are miserable to plow through, and are invariably filled with dry and seemingly superfluous detail. This book is different. Mahar mixes witty anecdotes with incisive analysis, and her claims about investing are offered in intelligent often playful prose, surrounded with a copious amount of recent historical material. Even well known stock-market figures--like Warren Buffet--look new here: we get a sense of why they acted as they did, and often a hint of what they may have been thinking. Recommended for anyone interested in learning more about investing, uncovering what the last bull run was all about, or meeting some of the major Wall Street players that were made into near-celebrities.