Investing Against The Tide

This authoritative and accessible investment classic promises rare insight into what it really takes to run money in a top-performing investment fund. Anthony Bolton, the UK’s most successful stock market investor, tells the story of his contrarian approach to managing money. He provides invaluable lessons on the factors that really matter in picking a stock: the need to identify good managers, how to run a portfolio, the importance of value investing, reading charts and how to trade successfully. It’s not easy to continually buy low and sell high. This book gives clear directions for doing well in the stock market, and doing well consistently. Investing Against the Tide shows you how to make the right decisions at the right time. Anthony Bolton is considered the UK’s most successful stock market investor and fund manager. Over twenty five years he delivered a market-beating return of 20% in his Fidelity Special Situations Fund. How did he do it, and what can you learn from him? In Investing Against the Tide, Anthony Bolton tells the story of his contrarian approach to managing money. He provides invaluable lessons on the factors that really matter when investing: how to pick a stock, the need to identify good managers, how to run a portfolio, the importance of value investing, reading charts and how to trade successfully. In this account of financial accomplishment, Bolton reveals the secrets of his success. It’s not easy constantly to buy low and sell high and this book gives clear directions for doing well in the stock market, and doing well consistently. Chapter by chapter Investing Against the Tide shows you how to make the right decisions at the right time and featured key lessons show you how you really can learn from a life running money. Investing Against the Tideis an authoritative guide for investment professionals, offering them a rare insight into what it really takes to run money in a top-performing fund, as well as providing amateur investors the chance to learn the stock-picking strategies from a leading money-manager. About the author Anthony Bolton left Cambridge University with a degree in engineering to begin a career in the City. He started as a graduate trainee working for Keyser Ullmann in 1971 before taking up a full time position as an assistant in their investment department. In 1976 he moved to Schlesingers where he became, for the first time, an investment manager. In 1979, aged 29, he was recruited by Fidelity, the international fund management group, as one of its first London-based investment managers, a move that proved to be the launch of a long and successful career. In surveys of professional investors, he is regularly voted the fund manager most respected by his peers. He retired from full-time investment management at the end of 2007, but continues to work at Fidelity as a mentor of the analysts and younger fund managers as well as being involved in overseeing Fidelity’s investment process. His hobby is composing classical music. Anthony Bolton is married with three children and lives in West Sussex.

Who is the most successful investment manager in Britain? Arguments could rage forever, but no professional would dispute that Anthony Bolton of Fidelity is among the very best. £1,000 invested in his Special Situations fund at its launch in 1979 was worth more than £125,000 twenty seven years later. No other mainstream UK fund manager has put together such a consistently impressive performance over such a long period. The 125-fold increase represents an average compound growth rate of more than 20% per annum, or 7% per annum greater than the FTSE All-Share Index over the same period. This track record of sustained outperformance stands comparison with that of the greatest American investment superstars such as Warren Buffett and Peter Lynch. For many years, until the fund was voluntarily split in 2006, Fidelity Special Situations was easily the largest and most popular fund in the UK. What are the secrets of Anthony Bolton's success? This important book, now fully revised and updated, takes an in-depth look at the way that Bolton goes about his business and analyses in detail the fund's outstanding performance. Anthony Bolton gives his own personal account of the history of the fund, explains why he believes his contrarian stockpicking methods have worked so well for so long and summarises the lessons he has learnt from his long and succesful career. This book is required reading for anyone with a personal or professional interest in investment. - Fully revised and updated second edition with 25 pages of new material and graphics. - The only full-length book to analyse in detail the strategies and techniques used by the UK's number one professional investor. - Detailed analysis of the performance of his funds and the lessons that investors can draw from its exceptional track record. - Written jointly by Anthony Bolton and one of the UK's best known financial authors, a leading authority on the fund management business.

CNBC's Fast Money Commentator Steve Cortes shows how to buck the trend and become a well-informed investor The public needs to think independently and not be duped, particularly because those who are selling their messages or promoting their ideas have a plethora of powerful media through which to do so. Against the Herd presents six contrarian views of major events that will shape the future. Steve Cortes of CNBC pulls no punches in explaining these trends. Many will find his views counterintuitive and even controversial. Some will find his forecasts alarming. But open-minded readers who are willing to heed his well-informed advice will find it illuminating, beneficial, and profitable. Steve Cortes presents six contrarian views of major events that will shape the future for investors including the fall of China and the end of the golden era of free trade The contrarian stances are presented because they are actionable Reveals how these events will affect global markets and specific investments, and how and when to take advantage of these key moves Against the Herd shows you how to profit by bucking conventional wisdom and what to do to get ready when situations call for contrarian investing.

Over the past five years, James Whiddon has interviewed some of the world’s brightest, best, and most influential men and women in finance on his popular radio show, The Investing Revolution. While the topics under discussion have ranged widely, the show’s mission has remained constant: Reveal the truth about how Wall Street has rigged the game so that it always wins—at everyone else’s expense—and offer investors an alternative to Wall Street to help them participate directly in free market capitalism and achieve astonishing longterm gains. In The Investing Revolutionaries, Whiddon distills all of that financial genius into a witty, wise elixir guaranteed to cure what ails your aching portfolio. Indispensable reading for professional and retail investors who want to free themselves from the tyranny of the Wall Street status quo, it delivers the insights of a host of luminaries, including John Bogle, Michael Mauboussin, Mohamed El-Erian, Richard Thaler, and Jeremy Siegel. Each financial powerhouse featured in the book weighs in on the slick marketing ploys, statistical sleights of hand, and psychological button-pushing the denizens of Lower Manhattan routinely employ to separate you from your money. They also offer priceless tips on such topics as The advantages of passive versus active portfolio management (how to achieve stellar gains through superdiversification) Global investing (is China really a good investment?) Avoiding common behavioral traps (running with the herd will get you gored) Forget about stock picking and market timing. Say farewell to mutual fund gurus and the hyperbolic claims of the technical wizards. Investors of the world, you have nothing to lose but your chains. And now The Investing Revolutionaries provides you with the key.

A must-read book for investors who prefer to pick stocks based on cash flow facts, not on media hype and fiction How to Pick a Stock is written for the contrarian investor who wants an investing method that is based on cash flow facts, not on media hype and speculative impulse. This book combines an accessible presentation of a contrarian investment model and the ValuFocus tool that offers a highly studious, detailed explanation of understanding a company's true intrinsic value. If you can calculate a company's intrinsic value on the basis of knowing if the market is currently under, fairly, or over pricing its stock, then it is possible to invest wisely in the stock market. Investors who want to buy undervalued stocks, or sell (short) overvalued ones will find this book immensely useful. The ValuFocus investing tool calculates the intrinsic value of every company in their database automatically. Thus, an individual investor can become an "A" student of a modeling process, or can go right ahead in using this tool to pick stocks and manage their own portfolio. Additionally, this book helps to develop an enhanced framework to fundamental equity valuation. Contains the ValuFocus tool for calculating the intrinsic value of every company in the LCRT Nucleus database Offers specific and innovative valuation techniques of practicing professionals for individuals to use in picking stocks long-term Highlights the most state-of-the-art approaches to unconventional stock-picking for investors and corporate finance professionals Offering encouragement to individual investors by outlining a model that delivers satisfying returns, How to Pick a Stock is especially useful for those who are patient and believe in longer-term investing horizons.

A delightful as well as educational read. It should be a set text for anyone interested in trade policy - The Economist.

Bobby Monks is blowing the whistle on Wall Street, giving middle class Americans the low down on how they’re being fleeced of their retirement money—and what they can do about it Every month our financial statements arrive, and every month we glance at them, trying to understand, hoping that we’ll come out ahead. But most of us have no idea what’s really going on or the costs involved. According to Bobby Monks—who has been a banker and borrower, investor and entrepreneur—financial firms and money managers have complicated the investing process to keep us in the dark, profiting from our ignorance. Having dealt with the financial sector throughout his career, Monks has seen it all. In Uninvested, he reveals how, when, and why the relationship between us and our money managers became corrupted—and what we can do to fix it. Monks shows how the system works not only against us as individuals but also against society at large. Without our knowledge or approval, our money is diverted into the pockets of CEOs and misappropriated, promoting business practices that contribute to economic inequality, political dysfunction, and environmental woe. Monks’ experiences give him a unique perspective on how we got to this point. Drawing on original research and interviews with key figures such as Vanguard founder Jack Bogle, legendary investor Carl Icahn, and former congressman Barney Frank of the Dodd-Frank Act, Monks teaches us how to take back ownership and control of our money. As he writes: Even in the decades preceding the most recent downturn, very few investors enjoyed financial success equal to that of their money managers. Given this, I have long wondered why investors don’t pull their money out of the system en masse. I suspect that it is because most feel powerless. Unaware of the implications of their investments and unable to penetrate the excruciating complexity of the system that facilitates them, many seem to seek refuge in their money managers’ aura of sophistication, pretense of competence, and projection of certainty. It seems to me that most investors are simply sleepwalking through the investing process. They have become uninvested. When we outsource our investing, we sacrifice control—but not responsibility. My goal in writing this book is to convince you that the best (and only) way to fix this broken system is to awaken a critical mass of engaged investors and recruit them to participate more fully in the investing process.