market

To Market, To Market
$7.00
This has been a favorite of mine to share with toddlers for years. It's popular sung or read. The black and white photos of an old style grocery store with the expressive drawings are what attracted me. The children like to find the animals hiding in the dishwasher, cupboad, couch ect., honing their eye for detail.

Market, The
$8.99
From the second Kate gets the secret IM about the market I was hooked! I had to know who was playing her, and who was really her friend in her new found popularity :) I read this in a day...because curiousty kills the cat!

The Myth of the Rational Market: A History of Risk, Reward, and Delusion on Wall Street
$27.99
This book does a good job tracking the different views about the behavior of the stock market that people have proposed throughout the history of the market. Beginning with Irving Foster's stolen manuscript, eventually re-written into "The Nature of Capital and Income," which details the time-value of money and stressed that the value of an investment is the income that it will produce, and moving on to Macaulay and his exploration of the behavior of stocks as a random walk through Harry Markowitz's decision to use the mean and variance as tools to determine the expected return and risk of a certain stock, the book explores the early economists and introduces their theories in a logical and well thought out way.
Moving steadily towards present day, Fox continues his examination of Wall Street's most prevalent economists with a look at Eugene Fama and his realization of one of the most prevalent views on the stock market, that it is hard, if not impossible to outsmart and beat the market over an extended period of time. Fama noticed that "sophisticated traders" who read charts or who relied on fundamentals would notice any nonrandom patterns in the market and attack them in groups, with the end result being that these patterns went away. Because of this, Fama argued, any success based of off these techniques would be fleeting and make it difficult to sustain gains above what the overall market experienced.
From Fama's findings, the book moves on to an idea developed by Edward Renshaw and Paul Feldstein, that of a mutual fund that simply follows the Dow Jones Industrial Average, the basis for the first unmanaged funds that would not try to beat the market, but rather shadow it. Although this idea wasn't immediately met with success, it did spark a rebuttal by John Bogle, who argued that there was no need for a fund that simple tried to match the performance of the market, as many major funds had been beating it consistently since the 1930's (Bogle's response came in 1959). As time progressed however, actively managed funds began to change their values and less than two decades later, Bogle launched the first index mutual fund.
Fox details the exploits of numerous other economists in his book, but my favorite is his description of Warren Buffet, a man known for his incredible ability to beat the market over and over again, year after year. Fox's recap of Buffet's famous rebuttal to the random walk theory by describing a group of coin flipping orangutan millionaires (yes that's right, coin flipping orangutan millionaires) and how people would eventually be convinced that these orangutans possessed some special skill and would study their habits is my favorite part of the book. Buffet goes on to explain that this random walk method is not why some people are more adept at beating the market than others, but rather that certain people simply follow specific disciplines and are able to beat the market that way.
Overall, Fox's book explores a wide variety of subjects and different points of view on the inner workings of the stock market as a whole. The book gives the reader a good understanding of how views on market behavior have evolved and built upon one another throughout history and would be a good read for anyone interested in investing or who simply wants to know more about why the market may behave the way it does.

Playskool Cherry Blossom Market
$69.99
This is a cute place for my children to play "store". It took some time to set up but it was worth it. I do have to say, I would have have paid full MSRP for this product, but with the deal I got on Amazon, I am satisfied.