International Handbook of Convertible Securities

Long overlooked by mainstream money managers, convertible securities are catching fire within the alternative investment community.

Taking advantage of their systematic undervaluation relative to conventional stocks and bonds, investors are now using convertibles within a broad spectrum of investment strategies, ranging from high performance cash alternatives to small company stocks.

New convertibles structures and advanced hedging strategies are on the leading edge of the financial markets. The International Handbook of Convertible Securities is a must-read for all investors seeking exceptional risk-adjusted returns in the financial markets.

Over the past 2 years I've rummaged through several Noddings books, his work from the 1970s to this present volume, and they're all cliffhangers. That is, Noddings promises to guide you somewhere, and indeed he guides you to the top of a cliff --where he leaves you hanging. Interestingly, the best observations he currently offers concern warrant hedging, which is getting increasingly difficult to do successfully. Thus what's the point of the observations, here? Most of the rest of the book is a bit like looking at an owner's manual for something you don't own, with lots of diagrams and no supporting text/instructions.

Although this is an investment volume screaming for a reason to exist, there is a screaming need for good how-to literature on convertibles and convertible hedging. Noddings should have filled this need decades ago (when he started writing prolifically about this stuff), and might have kept a worthy and useful corner niche to readers hungry to understand this market. Instead, Noddings has a much larger and expanding corner of the second-hand book bin, which is exactly where this volume will go once you've spent about 20 minutes with it.


Not great.   June 17, 2002
3 out of 3 found this review helpful

A large proportion of this book is devoted to tables of data that by the time you get round to reading will be well out of date. ...Furthermore, as a relative newcomer to convertibles, I frankly I can't see who would find this book useful. For beginners, it skimps over the details leaving you with the feeling you haven't learned very much and the pages and pages of numbers leave you feeling angry that you've wasted your money. As for the experts, anyone who's actually in the business would know all this stuff already, and would know enough to fill in the gaps (and there are a lot of gaps). Which begs the question: why and for whom was this book written ?!

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