Quote from OddTrader:
Q
GABRIEL BURSTEIN, PhD, was a macro proprietary trader with Goldman Sachs. He currently heads Specialized Equity Sales & Trading at Daiwa Europe Ltd., London, a group he set up to sell European equity products to hedge funds based on long/short macro and relative-value ideas. He is a frequent speaker on new long/short macro strategies and the EMU at worldwide alternative investment and hedge fund conferences. Dr. Burstein received his PhD in mathematics from Imperial College of the University of London. He has had several papers published in mathematical control theory and in mathematical modeling in neurology, neuroendocrinology, and HIV immunology.
UQ
Would like to understand anything wrong with his macro approach, as you know.
He sounds brilliant; I probably should have kept my mouth shut. But, since I didn't... my initial reaction was to the reviews. When you have phrases like "new, lower-risk" combined with a lot of jargon and hype about innovative observations, it's usually a warning sign.
The first reviewer noted that "The entire work could be 2-3 chapters in normal prose and outline."
A lot of books that bill themselves as groundbreaking or heavy duty are built on simple, straightforward ideas with a lot of padding around them. Others of this type are filled with independent chunks of data rich information that don't actually lead to a broader understanding of anything, like a meal where you only get a single bite of each course.
I'm a fan of simplicity whenever possible because you'll usually get as much complexity as you can handle simply through the act of information intake and decision making, and the time for drilling down is after you know the lay of the land, not before.
Far better to start with the basics and ask yourself questions, in my opinion, than to jump into complexity from the start and neglect your foundation.
?