In a post about Nocera’s NYT column, superblogger Barry Ritholtz writes:
I am about halfway through The Myth of the Rational Market, and so far, its good wonky fun. (Justin, there’s your pull quote: “good wonky fun“).
Barry is a much better man than I. So far I’ve been so obsessed with self-promotion that I haven’t even tried to read his Bailout Nation. But I have looked at some of the charts and stuff (Barry invested a lot of time and money in making the book look good), and they definitely qualify as good, wonky fun.
By Justin Fox 
What the EFMH says is that liquid markets reflect (incorporate & value correctly *on average*) publicly available information. The implication is that unless you have inside information, you cannot beat the market *on average* (you can get higher average returns, if you take higher average risk). It does not say that markets are completely “rational” (whatever that means), or that they don’t have volatility, or occasional bubbles.
The prediction that you can’t beat the market is one of the most studied & scientifically validated ideas in all of Microeconomics (yes, this is a simple application of Micro). Monkeys throwing darts & random stock pickers have been found to do as well (again, on average) as high level money managers on Wall St.
Hey Justin,
Unless it pertained directly to research I was doing on Bailout Nation, I put aside books for more than a full year (April 2008 to May 2009) while I was writing. If it wasn’t research, it wasn’t even looked at. I also steered clear of anything current that might be too similar to what I was doing (avoiding even a hint of plagiarism)
But now that you are done, you can relax and let your PR people do the heavy lifting. Read a book, see a movie, just chill.
As to the excessive self-promotion, set up a site just for the book and promote away there~! As a totally random, non-self promotional example, something like: http://bailoutnation.net/
@Ritholtz: This is my self-promotional site. Clearly, I’m not doing enough of it. 😉
@gj: Read the book, then come back and comment.