High-Flying Adventures in the Stock Market

Author Molly Baker follows a top-performing mutual team around for a year, and shows you how they did it during the final six months. She gives you diary-like details as the time unfolds. That's the book. The essence of their edge is that they bought Internet IPOs and stocks much more aggressively than other, similar funds at a time when the Internet was a red-hot investment area. That's the "run with the bulls" part of the story. That's a reference by me to the concept that when the market is hot, you should get into the hottest part of the market (better known as momentum investing). If you take a more conservative approach, you don't make the big bucks. A major part of the year's big gains versus other funds comes in the last few minutes of the last trading day of 1998 as AOL surges following its addition to the S & P 500 Index. But how the team does it is very repetitive and boring, even though they go through a gut-wrenching drop as Russian bond failures collapse the stock market and Long Term Capital has to be rescued by the Fed. That's the "watching the paint dry" part of the story. This is a very challenging book to review accurately. The book has many fine qualities. Its best feature is that Molly Baker is terrific for finding everyday analogies for explaining basic stock market concepts. The priciness of P/E ratios is compared to women's shoes at different price levels, for example. So, if you know nothing about stocks, this book is actually a better source of explanations through analogies than any other book about investing I have ever read. However, if you know about stocks, her analogies just waste time and bulk up the book. The day-to-day activities of the investment managers are about as interesting as watching someone do their laundry. They pretty much do the same things, over . . . and over . . . and over. Rather than a diary-type recitation of many days, this would have been much more interesting if grouped into subject matters. That would have missed the "excitement" of the gains and losses during the year, but I doubt if too many people really care how a bunch of rich investment managers handle the stress of whether they get their three million plus for the year. I never found myself rooting for or against them. Unless you really want to know a lot about how mutual fund managers manage your money, you will probably not find this book very interesting. And naturally, your own managers probably do it differently.My firm does interviews with such institutional money managers every day, and we find that these people have many interesting ideas and insights. Somehow, very few of those ideas and insights made it into this book. That's a missed opportunity, for which I graded the book down one star.On the other hand, if you know nothing about the market, and want to find out how a group of winners did it one time, you will probably love this book. For you, it is a five star book!

Author Molly Baker follows a top-performing mutual team around for a year, and shows you how they did it during the final six months. She gives you diary-like details as the time unfolds. That's the book. The essence of their edge is that they bought Internet IPOs and stocks much more aggressively than other, similar funds at a time when the Internet was a red-hot investment area. That's the "run with the bulls" part of the story. That's a reference by me to the concept that when the market is hot, you should get into the hottest part of the market (better known as momentum investing). If you take a more conservative approach, you don't make the big bucks. A major part of the year's big gains versus other funds comes in the last few minutes of the last trading day of 1998 as AOL surges following its addition to the S & P 500 Index. But how the team does it is very repetitive and boring, even though they go through a gut-wrenching drop as Russian bond failures collapse the stock market and Long Term Capital has to be rescued by the Fed. That's the "watching the paint dry" part of the story. This is a very challenging book to review accurately. The book has many fine qualities. Its best feature is that Molly Baker is terrific for finding everyday analogies for explaining basic stock market concepts. The priciness of P/E ratios is compared to women's shoes at different price levels, for example. So, if you know nothing about stocks, this book is actually a better source of explanations through analogies than any other book about investing I have ever read. However, if you know about stocks, her analogies just waste time and bulk up the book. The day-to-day activities of the investment managers are about as interesting as watching someone do their laundry. They pretty much do the same things, over . . . and over . . . and over. Rather than a diary-type recitation of many days, this would have been much more interesting if grouped into subject matters. That would have missed the "excitement" of the gains and losses during the year, but I doubt if too many people really care how a bunch of rich investment managers handle the stress of whether they get their three million plus for the year. I never found myself rooting for or against them. Unless you really want to know a lot about how mutual fund managers manage your money, you will probably not find this book very interesting. And naturally, your own managers probably do it differently.My firm does interviews with such institutional money managers every day, and we find that these people have many interesting ideas and insights. Somehow, very few of those ideas and insights made it into this book. That's a missed opportunity, for which I graded the book down one star.On the other hand, if you know nothing about the market, and want to find out how a group of winners did it one time, you will probably love this book. For you, it is a five

As a reader who is just getting interested in investing, I found Ms. Baker's book very useful. Unlike many other books where you need to be familiar with technical terms and financial markets in order to benefit, this book is written for the novice investor. It is not meant to be a textbook. In Ms. Baker's words, she "wishes to give the reading and investing public a flavor for what their dollars in mutual funds do all day." In that she succeeds. I discovered that I really didn't understand some terms which I thought I had, and my understanding of others was greatly enhanced. For those of us not yet ready for (or interested in) deep, technical, financial reading, this book provides a very entertaining introduction to the field and the analogies the author uses are very helpful. It whetted my appetite to learn more.The good news - with a little bit of luck we might do as well as a mutual fund manager; the bad news - with a little bit of luck we might do as well as a mutual fund manager who we're paying to manage our money for us!

Well written and entertaining. Shows you what frigging joke the mutual fund industry is. A great companion book to Monkey Business: Swinging Through the Wall Street Jungle (a somewhat more shocking look at Wall Street's seedy underbelly). Hopefully Ms. Baker will have more to write later.

Through creative analogies and playful stories, Baker has a wonderful way of depicting the science and art of what these bizarre animals called 'mutual funds' are all about. She did a wonderful job of keeping me awake at night engaged in the fortunes of the Delaware funds.Alongside the story about Delware, the book is littered with a virtual dictionary of important, and often overlooked, investment terms and situations. Baker uses creative analogies that make the most complicated situations evident to novices. She clearly knows her stuff well enough to be a professor!All in all, a really fun read and a book that truly covers it all.