Trading and Electronic Markets: What Investment Professionals Need to Know

This is not exactly what I had expected. It didn't cost anything so I can't really complain.

Excellent overview

The series of CFA research foundation books are quite powerful in a way that they help you gain an understanding of certain areas fairly quickly. This book written by Larry Harris served as a crash course for me in trading. I get to know much trading that I did not know before, for example the pitfalls of VWAP as a benchmark, the computation of implementation shortfalls, opportunity costs and so on.I especially like the detailed description of flash crash at the appendix. It gave me so many details and my understandings of flash crash improved a lot.This book is fairly basic and I guess understanding of trading at this level would be helpful, if not necessary, for most market participants.

This book provides a great in depth description on the importance of the awareness of how, when, and where trading should be carried out. Such assessment is even more pressing given that "most" publications on finance tend to focus on security valuation, as if a "suitable" valuation alone (with an "appropriate" methodology and model) would lead to financial gains and avoid losses. Indeed, trading is scarcely acknowledged as being decisive or even relevant to accomplish an expected financial return with risk adjustment. The reader of this gem on "trading and electronic markets" will definitely bear in mind that knowledge on trading must never be detached from security valuation and even less from the debate on whether active investment is feasible (in contrast to indexing). All investment professionals definitely need to know and master the content of this well-written book.