The Best Investment Writing
Selected Writing from Leading Investors and Authors
edited by Meb Faber
Are you looking for some ideas to help you improve your portfolio? Let the brightest, most insightful minds in investing help.
The Best Investment Writing – Volume 1 contains 32 hand-selected articles. These are the best pieces from some of the most respected money managers and investment researchers in the world.
Invest With The House
Hacking The Top Hedge Funds
by Meb Faber
Picking stocks is hard—and competitive. The most talented investors in the world play this game, and if you try to compete against them, it’s like playing against the house in a casino. Luck can be your friend for a while, but eventually the house wins. But what if you could lay down your bets with the house instead of against it?
In the stock market, the most successful large investors—particularly hedge fund managers—represent the house. These managers like to refer to their top investments as their “best ideas.” In this book, you will learn how to farm the best ideas of the world’s top hedge fund managers. You will learn who they are, how to track their funds and stock picks, and how to use that information to help guide your own portfolio. In essence, you will learn how to play more like the house in a casino and less like the sucker relying on dumb luck.
Global Asset Allocation
A Survey of the World’s Top Investment Strategies
by Meb Faber
With all of our focus on assets – and how much and when to allocate them – are we missing the bigger picture?
Our book begins by reviewing the historical performance record of popular assets like stocks, bonds, and cash. We look at the impact inflation has on our money. We then start to examine how diversification through combining assets, in this case a simple stock and bond mix, works to mitigate the extreme drawdowns of risky asset classes.
But we go beyond a limited stock/bond portfolio to consider a more global allocation that also takes into account real assets. We track 13 assets and their returns since 1973, with particular attention to a number of well-known portfolios, like Ray Dalio’s All Weather portfolio, the Endowment portfolio, Warren Buffett’s suggestion, and others. And what we find is that, with a few notable exceptions, many of the allocations have similar exposures.
And yet, while we are all busy paying close attention to our portfolio’s particular allocation of assets, the greatest impact on our portfolios may be something we fail to notice altogether…
The Ivy Portfolio
How to Invest Like The Top Endowments and Avoid the Bear Markets
by Meb Faber
A do-it-yourself guide to investing like the renowned Harvard and Yale endowments.
The Ivy Portfolio shows step-by-step how to track and mimic the investment strategies of the highly successful Harvard and Yale endowments. Using the endowment Policy Portfolios as a guide, the authors illustrate how an investor can develop a strategic asset allocation using an ETF-based investment approach.
The Ivy Portfolio also reveals a novel method for investors to reduce their risk through a tactical asset allocation strategy to protect them from bear markets. The book will also showcase a method to follow the smart money and piggyback the top hedge funds and their stock-picking abilities. With readable, straightforward advice, The Ivy Portfolio will show investors exactly how this can be accomplished—and allow them to achieve an unparalleled level of investment success in the process.
With all of the uncertainty in the markets today, The Ivy Portfolio helps the reader answer the most often asked question in investing today – “What do I do”?
Global Value
How to Spot Bubbles, Avoid Market Crashes, and Earn Big Returns in the Stock Market
by Meb Faber
Investment bubbles and speculative manias have existed for as long as humans have been involved in markets. Is it possible for investors to identify emerging bubbles and then profit from their inflation? Likewise, can investors avoid the bursting of these bubbles, and the extreme volatility and losses found in their aftermath to survive to invest another day?
Over 70 years ago, Benjamin Graham and David Dodd proposed valuing stocks with earnings smoothed across multiple years. Robert Shiller later popularized this method with his version of the cyclically adjusted price-to-earnings (CAPE) ratio in the late 1990s and correctly issued a timely warning of poor stock returns to follow in the coming years. We apply this valuation metric across more than 40 foreign markets and find it both practical and useful. Indeed, we witness even greater examples of bubbles and busts abroad than in the United States. We then create a trading system to build global stock portfolios, and find significant outperformance by selecting markets based on relative and absolute valuation.
Shareholder Yield
A Better Approach to Dividend Investing
by Meb Faber
Shareholder Yield: A Better Approach to Dividend Investing shows step-by-step how to find returns in a low yield world. Investors have flocked to dividend stocks in search of yield; however, fewer companies are paying out less in dividends due to legal, tax, and structural changes in the US markets. Dividend payments are only one use of a company’s free cash flow; other uses of cash include: share repurchases, debt paydown, reinvestment in the business, and mergers and acquisitions.
Consequently, investors in the 21st century must look to all of the direct and indirect ways in which companies distribute their cash to shareholders, a metric commonly referred to as “Shareholder Yield”. In this book, we analyze portfolios based on the various cash flow metrics and find that portfolios of companies with high shareholder yields outperform both broad market indices and high dividend yield portfolios by a substantial margin.
With all of the uncertainty in the markets today, Shareholder Yield helps the reader answer one of the most often asked question in investing today – “Where do I find yield”?
