Furthermore

A Mathematician Plays the Market - John Allen Paulos

(Penguin, ISBN 0-141-01203-X)

I have to admit to being a little bit disappointed with this book. I think I probably expected too much of it. To be fair, it's a perfectly good introduction to some of the ideas in modern financial theory - portfolios, valuations, risk and the like. It has plenty of anecdotes - mainly about Paulos himself losing money on Worldcom, despite his mathematical knowledge - and the coverage is aimed at the intelligent layperson. There are one or two equations, but the maths is generally treated at the conceptual level.

I think my problem was that I thought the coverage would be deeper - more on the specifics of valuing different kinds of instruments, or on types of risk, or that there would be more mathematical speculation of the kind that say, Tom Koerner does in his "Pleasures of Counting" (Koerner on finance - that's a book I'd like to read). Instead, I found the book paddled through the shallows that I was pretty familiar with already.

So, good fun, and if you are new to this topic, you can learn quite a lot, but it's not for you if you are looking for any deeper treatment. Back to Bodie, Kane and Marcus for me - if only there was something in between.