Asset Management: A Systematic Approach to Factor Investing. 2014. By Andrew Ang. Oxford University Press, global.oup.com. 736 pages, $95.00

摘要

The phrases "finance textbook" and "page-turner" rarely occupy the same sentence or even the same paragraph, but Asset Management: A Systematic Approach to Factor Investing, by Andrew Ang, the Ann F. Kaplan Professor of Business at Columbia University, justifies that pairing of terms. The best economic writing often stretches the fabric of theory ever so gently over a frame of successive narratives. Ang follows this venerable recipe by beginning each chapter with a compelling story-variously involving war, revolution, fraud, drug-addled mutual fund executives, or, at a minimum, monumental financial incompetence-and then concluding with a coda from the same tale. (One wishes, though, that he had not overused "redux" with such abandon.) Of course, no serious finance text can dance the "full monty" of narrative economic history, executed by such masters of popular finance as Peter Bernstein, Edward Chancellor, and Frederick Taylor. Asset Management's exposition of finance is so muscular, however, that the reader does not mind as each chapter's opening narrative disappears, behind the turned pages, into dry theory and occasional thickets of equation-laden constructs. Writers of academic finance and economics titles should take note of Ang's deft delivery of potentially deadly material.