Chapter 8 brings us to inflation. And honestly, after all the credit stuff, this chapter feels like a breath of fresh air. It is a different beast. The inflation market is less developed than fixed income or credit. There is no inflation bond future. The options market is thin. Forward inflation trading was still finding its feet when this book was written.
In Chapter 22, Larry Harris asks the million-dollar question: Are you a genius, or just lucky? Most people trade because they want to get rich quickly, but few realize that beating the market is one of the hardest things in the world.
The specialist system is one of those things that sounds simple on paper but gets really complicated in practice. And controversial. Very controversial.
Chapter 10 is where Harris gets into one of the most important ideas in the entire book: how certain traders actually make prices accurate. Not because they want to help society. They just want to make money. The price accuracy is a side effect.
Chapter 13 of Behavioral Finance and Investor Types by Michael M. Pompian is about the single most important investment decision you will ever make. Not which stocks to buy. Not when to buy them. It is about how you split your money across different types of investments. That is asset allocation.
After sixty pages of philosophy, Rand gets back to doing what she does best: showing a world in freefall and the people trying to survive it.
You don’t become a systems thinker by reading a book. Not even this one.
That’s the honest message of Chapter 13 of Systems Thinking for Social Change. David Peter Stroh has spent the last twelve chapters laying out tools, frameworks, and real-world cases. Now he steps back and says: here’s how you actually grow into someone who thinks this way. It’s a lifelong thing. And it touches more than just your brain.
Part 1 covered stocks and the basics of asset classes. Now in the second half of Chapter 12 of Behavioral Finance and Investor Types, Michael Pompian walks through the rest of the investment universe: bonds, hedge funds, real assets, and finally how to put them all together into a portfolio.
This is a retelling of Chapter 7 (Part 2) from “Trading the Fixed Income, Inflation and Credit Markets: A Relative Value Guide” by Neil C. Schofield and Troy Bowler (Wiley, 2011, ISBN: 978-0-470-74229-7).
I know what you’re thinking. Ethics and corporate governance? That sounds like the most boring chapter in the book. But hear me out. This stuff directly affects whether your REIT investment is safe and whether the company is being run in your interest or someone else’s. Chapter 13 of Mike Hartley’s book makes a strong case for why you should care about this.