Book: Beating the Street by Peter Lynch with John Rothchild | ISBN: 978-0-671-75915-5
Mutual funds were supposed to make investing easy. Instead of picking stocks yourself, you just pick a fund. But here’s the thing. By the early ’90s there were more mutual funds than individual stocks on the New York and American exchanges combined. So now you had to pick from 3,565 funds. The confusion didn’t go away. It multiplied.
Here’s something most people don’t realize. If you have a pension, pay insurance premiums, or even have a retirement savings account, there’s a good chance some of your money is sitting in private equity right now. You didn’t choose it. Nobody asked you. But that’s how the system works.
There are somewhere between 8,000 and 10,000 hedge funds out there. Let that sink in for a second. Even if you had infinite money, how would you figure out which ones are actually good?
Book: Systematic Fixed Income: An Investor’s Guide Author: Scott A. Richardson, Ph.D. ISBN: 9781119900139 Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, 2022
Every trade starts with an order. And if you don’t understand orders, you’re basically showing up to a poker game without knowing the rules. Chapter 4 of Larry Harris’s “Trading and Exchanges” is all about orders, what they are, and the properties that make each type useful (or dangerous) in different situations.
This is post 6 of 23 in a series on Systems Thinking: Managing Chaos and Complexity by Jamshid Gharajedaghi (ISBN: 978-0-7506-7973-2).
If you can’t personally stand on the exchange floor and shout your trades, you need orders. In Chapter 4, Larry Harris breaks down the different types of instructions you can give your broker and why the specific type you choose is the biggest factor in your success.
Okay, so Chapter 5 of The Swiss Secret to Optimal Health is probably the most controversial section of the entire book. If you’ve grown up hearing “eat more protein” from every fitness influencer, every nutritionist, and basically every food advertisement, this chapter is going to challenge you.
In Part 1, we covered how China became the most important emerging market on the planet. Its economy is so large that it basically drives the entire EM asset class. We looked at trade links, commodity demand, leverage concerns, the current account surplus disappearing, and the capital account slowly opening up.
Book: Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand (35th Anniversary Edition, ISBN: 9781101137192)
This chapter is a big one. It gives us the full backstory on Francisco d’Anconia and turns what seemed like a side plot into the emotional core of the book. It’s also where Rand pulls off something clever: she makes you fall in love with a character and then shows you his apparent destruction, all in the same chapter.