I
began my career in finance at a firm headed by a Museum of Modern Art trustee.
The firm championed art as a legitimate investment category. I learned the objective, quantitative methods
for valuing stocks and bonds, but art valuation appeared subjective.
Had this book been available then,
it would have shown me that rigorous methodology can be applied to art valuation. The
authors fascinatingly describe how the values of Renoirs vary depending on the
size of the canvas, their orientation (landscape or portrait), where they are
auctioned, and whether they include a nude figure.
As a bonus, relevant even to readers who do
not contemplate investing in art, they document fundamental flaws in certain
standard valuation tools employed in more conventional asset classes.
The market for art can be as eye-catching as artworks themselves. Works by artists from da Vinci and Rembrandt to Picasso and Modigliani have sold for hundreds of millions of dollars. The world's ultrawealthy increasingly treat art as part of their portfolios. Since artworks are often valuable assets, how should financial professionals analyze them?
Arturo Cifuentes and Ventura Charlin provide an expert guide to the methods, risks, and rewards of investing in art. They detail how to apply the financial and statistical tools and techniques used to evaluate more traditional investments such as stocks, bonds, and real estate to art…
When I signed up for an introductory statistics course in college, I expected it would cover exactly what this book addresses. At that time, newspaper articles sometimes referred to the book that inspired this one, Darrell Huff’s How to Lie with Statistics.
I was excited to learn how to avoid getting snared by inadvertent and intentional flaws in public opinion polls, medical studies, and investment research. In a highly readable, entertaining style, Charles Wheelan arms his readers against all those pitfalls.
The somewhatabstruse quantitative methods actually taughtemphasized in the statistics course proved to be helpful professionally. But Wheelan’s statistical malpractice stories are both accessible to readers unfamiliar with the underlying math and informative to those who are.
Once considered tedious, the field of statistics is rapidly evolving into a discipline Hal Varian, chief economist at Google, has actually called "sexy." From batting averages and political polls to game shows and medical research, the real-world application of statistics continues to grow by leaps and bounds. How can we catch schools that cheat on standardized tests? How does Netflix know which movies you'll like? What is causing the rising incidence of autism? As best-selling author Charles Wheelan shows us in Naked Statistics, the right data and a few well-chosen statistical tools can help us answer these questions and more.…
I
love the author’s style, which goes deeply into character and motivations in an
unhurried way.
The suspense in this noir
builds powerfully as it takes the time to detail the remote
setting of the events and interactions. Here is one thriller that definitely cannot be called a guilty pleasure,
given the intense involvement to which it compels you.
Buried deep in rural France, little remains of the isolated hamlet of the Three Lone Girls, save a few houses and a curiously assembled quartet: Patrice Bergogne, inheritor of his family's farm; his wife, Marion; their daughter, Ida; and their neighbour, Christine, an artist. While Patrice plans a surprise for his wife's fortieth birthday, inexplicable events start to disrupt the hamlet's quiet existence: anonymous, menacing letters, an unfamiliar car rolling up the driveway. And as night falls, strangers stalk the houses, unleashing a nightmarish chain of events.
Told in rhythmic, propulsive prose that weaves seamlessly from one consciousness to the…
How huge a return does a stock have to deliver to
rank number one for the year among all the stocks in the S&P 500? That number has historically ranged from a
hefty 80% to a colossal 743%. Would it
interest you to know the characteristics of the stocks that took off like that?
The Little Book of Picking Top Stocks
reveals the quantitative metrics and the qualitative factors that identify the
stocks that have the potential to reach #1. They’re not the kind of thing you see in Wall Street research
reports—earnings per share forecasts, price targets, etc.
Investment expert Marty Fridson shows why traditional securities analysis falls short when picking
the best of the very best stocks.
