TRADING: Inside the World's Leading Stock Exchanges

This random-walk report on a handful of the global village's 130-odd financial marketplaces will be of scant interest and little use to investors anywhere. Goldenberg (a Canadian business writer) provides mainly anecdotal coverage of just over a dozen securities, commodities, and options exchanges. Her conglomerate approach might have paid some dividends had she made an effort to evaluate the implications of individuals' and institutions' new-fashioned capacity to establish investment positions in one mart and hedge, leverage, or otherwise manage them in another--across any number of time zones. Unfortunately, Goldenberg settles for discrete profiles that emphasize without illuminating intra-industry rivalries, e.g., between the august NYSE and upstart NASDAQ as well as also-ran outposts in Chicago, Los Angeles, Montreal, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Toronto. Her narrative briefings on exchanges in Frankfurt, London, Paris, Tokyo, and Zurich are scarcely more instructive. Equally off-putting are frequent reminders that the author (whose style can best be described as graceless) has something less than full command of her material. A by no means untypical example: ""(T)he US securities industry is debating whether to replace the traditional stock exchange floor--where traders shout and flail their arms--with a younger, extremely successful computer box method. ""Gerald Warfield's How to Buy Foreign Stocks and Bonds (p. 42) offers comprehensive rundowns on more than a score of major offshore exchanges, plus details on trading procedures, host countries' economic environments, and other matters of interest to investors. Also worth a look is Adrian Day's International Investment Opportunities (1983).