When Markets Collide

Posted on Mar 17, 2009 in Books, Finance

I recently read Mohamed A. El-Erian’s When Markets Collide: Investment Strategies for the Age of Global Economic Change. The book has been sitting in my shelf for a few months but since it got the Financial Times Book of the Year Award last year and was hyped a lot over the holidays I finally caved and read it.

I may have started reading the book with a bit of a bias because of all the hype and was expecting a good read. But it turned out that my enjoyment from reading this book was much less then expected and it was a chore to actually finish the thing with multiple pit stops and even reading a whole other book in between chapters.

The book starts off by introducing the reader to the concept and realization of emerging markets and he sort of talks about it like no one realizes that they are becoming increasingly important and their foreign currency surpluses are rising exponentially. Although this is a important point I feel that the writing is in such a way that he assumes you’ve been living in a cave for 10 years and he spends well over 50 pages on something that could have been summed up in 5. Many of the other subjects in the book also fall into this pattern. Another gripe I had with the book was that it seemed to lack focus, like the chapters had been written disjointly and spliced together in the editing phase.

In spite of what I didn’t like about the book it is does have numerous good subjects and covers them fairly well. The risk management section at the end strikes at some important but well known points. But it sort of just sounds like an afterthought to the book with some fancy risk terminology thrown in just to have it there. What I liked best about the book was that it pointed out the fact that people have to sometimes step back and look at the whole picture when dealing with financial markets (“Sometimes you can’t see the forest for the trees”).

I’m not sure if I would recommend the book but it is a pretty quick read if you force yourself through it instead of reading it on and off on the tube like I did over a whole week. I’d say if you can borrow it read it but don’t buy it, it’s not worth buying.


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