Augustin Lebron, formerly a trader and researcher at Jane Street Capital and now head of a consulting firm on decision-making, has written a refreshingly cerebral book, The Laws of Trading: A Trader’s Guide to Better Decision-making for Everyone (Wiley, 2019). Although the book’s pitch is that “mental tools, forged...
Equity Smart Beta and Factor Investing for Practitioners by Khalid Ghayur, Ronan G. Heaney, and Stephen C. Platt (Wiley, 2019) is, according to the publisher, the first full-length book on these topics, although scores of papers have been published on smart beta and equity factors. The named authors are...
To understand the title of Michael O’Sullivan’s book, you must go back to 1647 England and the Putney Debates. A year after King Charles I lost the English Civil War to forces led by Oliver Cromwell, people met to debate the future constitution of England. The Levellers—ordinary people, including...
If you are a burgeoning equity analyst or a self-directed fundamental investor, you will be confronted with reams of corporate financial data, from EBITDA to net present value. Even if you know how to calculate financial formulas, do you know what they are telling you? Can you put them...
John Stepek, executive editor of the UK’s best-selling financial magazine MoneyWeek, has written an astute book for retail investors. The Sceptical Investor: How Contrarians Bet Against the Market and Win—And You Can Too (Harriman House, 2019) suggests that the investor start with the admittedly incorrect premise that the financial...
Cornelius C. Bond spent many years at T. Rowe Price, first as a technology analyst and eventually as president of the T. Rowe Price Growth Stock Fund. For almost ten years he worked directly with T. Rowe Price himself. In writing T. Rowe Price: The Man, the Company, and...
Turning the Flywheel: Why Some Companies Build Momentum … and Others Don’t (HarperBusiness, 2019) is a short (40-page) monograph intended to accompany Jim Collins’s iconic bestseller Good to Great, published back in 2001. I never read Good to Great, so I can attest that Turning the Flywheel stands proudly...
Safi Bahcall’s Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries (St. Martin’s Press, 2019) is a terrific book, one I couldn’t put down. And it’s not just for people making business decisions. It’s for anyone who wants to understand the sociology of...
On February 11, President Donald Trump launched the American AI Initiative, directing federal agencies to focus on the technology. The United States was slow to take even this admittedly vague action. At least 18 other countries had already announced national AI strategies. Canada was the first off the blocks,...
Trust me, there’s a lot about ETFs that you don’t know. David Stevenson, a columnist at the Financial Times, and David Tuckwell, editor of ETF Stream, set out to remedy that situation. The Ultimate ETF Guidebook (Harriman House, 2019), even though in some of its chapters it tilts toward...
Niall J. Gannon, of the Gannon Group at Morgan Stanley, is a financial advisor for high net worth and ultra high net worth individuals and families. And yet Tailored Wealth Management: Exploring the Cause and Effect of Financial Success (Palgrave Macmillan) is applicable to all investors, at any stage...
Shoshana Zuboff, professor emerita at Harvard Business School, has the rare ability to take a subject that has been beaten to death and offer a fresh, provocative take on it. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (Public Affairs/Hachette,...
A heads up to anyone who wants to understand how some very bright quants think. I just downloaded AQR’s anthology commemorating its 20th anniversary. It’s big, coming in at nearly 700 pages, and free for the taking in either .mobi or .epub formats. Personally, I can’t think of a...
Twenty years of research inform The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth (Wiley, 2019) by Amy C. Edmondson, a professor at the Harvard Business School. Although by now most managers know, at least in theory, that they should provide an environment in...
Another year, another idiosyncratic list of what I consider to be the best books I reviewed this year, with links to my reviews. Q3 hedge fund letters, conference, scoops etc Photo by jill111 (Pixabay) Michael Batnick, Big Mistakes Cochrane & Moskowitz, eds., The Fama Portfolio Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets Sebastian Edwards, American Default Meb Faber,...
Bruce I. Jacobs’ Too Smart for Our Own Good: Ingenious Investment Strategies, Illusions of Safety, and Market Crashes (McGraw-Hill, 2018) attempts to identify the common causes of financial crises since the 1980s. Jacobs, the co-founder of Jacobs Levy Equity Management and its co-chief investment officer and co-director of research,...
Delivering Alpha: Lessons from 30 Years of Outperforming Investment Benchmarks (McGraw-Hill, 2019) by Hilda Ochoa-Brillembourg is written for “any finance professional who wants to know how to add sustainable value to globally diversified institutional portfolios beyond what’s learned in textbooks.” The author, after an 11-year stint at the World...
Branding has gotten a bad rap in the wake of Donald Trump’s election to the presidency. It has been conflated with egotism and narcissism. But entrepreneurs and companies work hard to develop and burnish their brands, knowing that it is an essential part of doing business. In Legacy in...
The Stock Trader’s Almanac is now in its 52th edition. Not quite the track record of The Old Farmer’s Almanac, which launched in 1792, but presumably a tad more data driven. Q3 hedge fund letters, conference, scoops etc The spiral bound almanac opens flat for easy access to its data or...
It’s hard to have missed Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich, which has sold more than 100 million copies since it was published in 1937 and helped spawn the self-improvement marketplace, currently valued at $10 billion in the United States alone. A few years ago material was unearthed in...
Robin R. Speziale, author of Market Masters, is a 31-year-old, self-taught Canadian growth investor. In this second edition of Capital Compounders: How to Beat the Market and Make Money Investing in Growth Stocks he shares the principles that have guided his wealth-building journey. Q3 hedge fund letters, conference, scoops etc Although...
In 2014 Daniel Crosby, a psychologist and asset manager, co-authored the bestselling Personal Benchmark: Integrating Behavioral Finance and Investment Management and followed that up in 2016 with The Laws of Wealth. Another two years and he’s produced a new book: The Behavioral Investor (Harriman House, 2018). His “admittedly audacious”...
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