In Chapter 23, Larry Harris explores one of the biggest financial innovations of the last 50 years: Index Trading. Today, more money moves in index products (like the SPY ETF or S&P 500 futures) than in the individual stocks themselves.
Chapter 11 is about the shady side of trading. Harris introduces order anticipators: people who profit not by knowing what a stock is worth, but by figuring out what other traders are about to do and trading before them. They are parasites. Harris uses that word deliberately. No better prices. No liquidity. They just extract money from other people’s trades.
This is the last chapter. Thirty chapters, three parts, over a thousand pages, and it all comes down to this: a rescue mission, a broken machine, a dead city, and a man standing on a mountain tracing a symbol in the air.
Theory is nice. But does behavioral finance actually work when real people sit across from real bankers with real money on the table?
Book: Real Estate by the Numbers: A Complete Reference Guide to Deal Analysis Authors: J Scott and Dave Meyer Chapters: 25-27
And that’s a wrap. We’ve gone through every chapter of Real Estate Investment Trust Investing: The Secret to Passive Income from REITs by Mike Hartley (published 2023), and it’s been a ride. Sixteen posts covering everything from “what even is a REIT” to estate planning and ethics. So let me share some final thoughts.
Not every trade happens on an exchange. A lot of trading happens away from organized markets, and how it happens raises some genuinely difficult questions about whether investors are getting a fair deal.
We made it. Chapter 9 is the final content chapter of Tim Richards’ “Investing Psychology.” And it’s not really about new ideas. It’s a wrap-up. A summary. A last attempt to remind you what you should have learned, and why most of us will still ignore it.
Book: Financial Markets and Institutions, 11th Edition Author: Jeff Madura Publisher: Cengage Learning, 2015 Series: Chapter 15 Review
A swap is an agreement between two parties to exchange a set of payments over time. The most common type swaps fixed interest rate payments for floating ones. Chapter 15 covers the different types of swaps, how they are priced, what risks they carry, and how the swap market nearly brought down the financial system.
In the second half of Chapter 22, Larry Harris digs into why that 5-star mutual fund you saw in a magazine might be a terrible investment. The industry is designed to hide the losers and highlight the lucky.