Summary of Peter L. Bernstein's Capital Ideas

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Book Preview: #1 The demand for the wisdom produced by armies of security analysts, portfolio managers, television pundits, software peddlers, and newspaper columnists shows no sign of waning. Some of the wealthiest people on Wall Street are professionals whose bank accounts have been inflated by a constant flow of investment advisory fees.#2 Bachelier was a French mathematician who developed the theory of probability and stochastic processes in an attempt to explain the behavior of stock prices. He was a frustrated unknown in his own time, and it was long before he finally won an appointment at the provincial university at Besancon.#3 Bachelier s real problem was that he had chosen an odd topic for his dissertation. He was convinced that the financial markets were a rich source of data for mathematicians and students of probability. His superiors did not agree.#4 The key to Bachelier s insight is his observation that contradictory opinions about market changes diverge so much that at the same instant buyers believe in a price increase and sellers believe in a price decrease. This means that prices will only move when the market has reason to change its mind about what the price considered most likely is going to be.