A Non Random Walk Down Wall Street

Andrew W. Lo, A. Craig MacKinlay, "A Non-Random Walk Down Wall Street"

Prin.ton U.ty Press | 2001 | ISBN: 0691092567 | 448 pages | PDF | 17,7 MB

Review

Where are today's exploitable anomalies? Lo and MacKinlay argue that fast computers, chewing on newly available, tick-by-tick feeds of market-transaction data, can detect regularities in stock prices that would have been invisible as recently as five years ago. One example: 'clientele bias,' in which certain stocks are popular with investors who have certain trading styles. A case in point that doesn't take a supercomputer to detect, is day traders' current enthusiasm for Internet stocks. Lo says that day traders tend to overreact to news--whether that news is positive or negative--so it should be possible to profit by taking the opposite side of their trades. -- Review

Review

This provocative collection of essays provides careful empirical analyses of the major anomalies that have appeared in financial markets in the thirty-five years since Paul Cootner's influential Random Character of Stock Market Prices. It provides convincing evidence against the random walk as applied to stock markets, and at the same time warns us of the dangers of finding spurious anomalies. It is a worthy successor to Cootner's classic. (Michael Brennan, University of California, Los Angeles )