Any opinions of "Option Theory" by Peter James, Wiley, nov 2002? Thanks Anna Maria

When Mr. Buffet pulled his money out of GenRe, he mentioned that he is not comfortable about the profit that is visible only through a sophisticated mathematical model, I heard. This sounds quite familiar to me: one of my old friend, a successful investment banker, once told me that profit is something that you can calculate with a calculator (not the one that requires several hours of cpu). Perhaps not as simple as this, I believe. But on the other hand, if it really requires a very peculiar model to state an unrealized profit, can we confidently tell our shareholders that we are making money?Mathematical models of financial derivatives are quite sophisticate, indeed. Sometimes I see people, who are trained as a scientist, spending many hours in front of computers, ending up mis-pricing a deal due to minor errors (such as sign error). I've done the same mistake before. It is quite embarrassing for a quant to produce a value that doesn't pass the smell test given by a marketer or a trader. Later I learned that experienced quants have their own good ways of performing sanity checks.I spent few hours reading this book, when I was asked for my opinion about it.Peter's book is definitely NOT a book for those who want to pick up hard core quant skills: he assumes the Black-Scholes framework through out the book. BUT he explains the basics very clearly, providing enough tools for sanity checks. If a marketer (or an accountant) working for a structure product shop understands the material of this book, I'd give him an ace.

it's not too bad as predominantly theory books go but follows clewlow and strickland in mixing up the jarrow & rudd (should be p=0.5) and cox, ross & rubinstein (u=1/d) binomial tree parameters