Outsmarting The Crowd

WE ARE WIRED TO FAIL WITH MONEY AND INVESTING. Do You Have $1 on You? BEFORE YOU START READING, please reach for your wallet. Take out a one-dollar bill. Do you have it? Look at it, hold it up, put it in front of you. Now imagine you save $1 each month (which few do). Imagine that your $1 earns 7% annually on average over thirty years. At the end of the thirty years you will have almost $1,200. Needless to say, if you put away $1,000 each month, you'd have almost $1.2 million in thirty years. It's secondary if you are just starting your family fortune--or if you already have it and want to keep it and grow it. If you do nothing with that dollar, inflation will eat away at its value. It will be worth less than two quarters in twenty-five years and less than a single quarter in fifty years and a nickel in one hundred years. Can you afford to do nothing? Do I have your attention? Most books misinform, or intimidate the reader, and often are not backed by real life experience. This book is a one of a kind, comprehensive, straightforward, and easy to follow guide to investing. It's written by an experienced investor trained in the value investing, Buffett-Graham school of thought. Like no other book, it covers both the intellectual and emotional discipline needed to be a successful investor. It provides the proper philosophy, shows the path, and emphasizes the principles required to keep and grow your wealth over a lifetime. "Over more than a decade, Bogumil has assiduously assembled a set of rules from the writings and the speeches of the world's most lastingly successful investors: these rules have become his chosen investment discipline. [...] He has written a great road map for young investors as well as a thoughtful and very readable guide to spare older neophytes the most common investment mistakes." - Francois D. Sicart, Founder and Chairman of Tocqueville Asset Management. "Now comes his book. Obviously, Bogumil was augmenting what we were teaching him over the years about the investment process with extensive readings by the great thinkers on this subject. Unlike some of these tomes, however, Bogumil's "Outsmarting the Crowd" is an easily digestible, common sense approach to a subject that is too often wrapped in jargon made to make it appear more difficult and less intuitive than it actually is." - Robert W. Kleinschmidt, President, Chief Executive Officer and Chief Investment Officer of Tocqueville Asset Management. "

Train your brain to be a real contrarian and outsmart the crowd Beat the Crowd is the real contrarian’s guide to investing, with comprehensive explanations of how a true contrarian investor thinks and acts – and why it works more often than not. Bestselling author Ken Fisher breaks down the myths and cuts through the noise to present a clear, unvarnished view of timeless market realities, and the ways in which a contrarian approach to investing will outsmart the herd. In true Ken Fisher style, the book explains why the crowd often goes astray—and how you can stay on track. Contrarians understand how headlines really affect the market and which noise and fads they should tune out. Beat the Crowd is a primer to the contrarian strategy, teaching readers simple tricks to think differently and get it right more often than not. Discover the limits of forecasting and how far ahead you should look Learn why political controversy matter less the louder it gets Resurrect long-forgotten, timeless tricks and truths in markets Find out how the contrarian approach makes you right more often than wrong A successful investment strategy requires information, preparation, a little bit of brainpower, and a larger bit of luck. Pursuit of the mythical perfect strategy frequently lands folks in a cacophony of talking heads and twenty-four hour noise, but Beat the Crowd cuts through the mental clutter and collects the pristine pieces of actual value into a tactical approach based on going against the grain.

INVESTING IS ONE OF THE FEW AREAS IN LIFE WHERE EVEN VERY SMART PEOPLE LET HOPE TRIUMPH OVER EXPERIENCE According to Wall Street Journal investing colum­nist Spencer Jakab, most of us have no idea how much money we’re leaving on the table—or that the average saver doesn’t come anywhere close to earning the “average” returns touted in those glossy brochures. We’re handicapped not only by psychological biases and a fear of missing out, but by an industry with multimillion-dollar marketing budgets and an eye on its own bottom line, not yours. Unless you’re very handy, you probably don’t know how to fix your own car or give a family member a decent haircut. But most Americans are expected to be part-time fund managers. With a steady, livable pension check becoming a rarity, we’ve been entrusted with our own finances and, for the most part, failed miserably. Since leaving his job as a top-rated stock ana­lyst to become an investing columnist, Jakab has watched his readers—and his family, friends, and colleagues—make the same mistakes again and again. He set out to evaluate the typical advice people get, from the clearly risky to the seemingly safe, to figure out where it all goes wrong and how they could do much better. Blending entertaining stories with some sur­prising research, Jakab explains ·How a typical saver could have a retirement nest egg twice as large by being cheap and lazy. ·Why investors who put their savings with a high-performing mutual fund manager end up worse off than if they’d picked one who has struggled. ·The best way to cash in on your hunch that a recession is looming. ·How people who check their brokerage accounts frequently end up falling behind the market. ·Who isn’t nearly as good at investing as the media would have you think. He also explains why you should never trust a World Cup–predicting octopus, why you shouldn’t invest in companies with an X or a Z in their names, and what to do if a time traveler offers you eco­nomic news from the future. Whatever your level of expertise, Heads I Win, Tails I Win can help you vastly improve your odds of investment success.

If like millions of others you know deep down that you deserve to do better than where you are today, than this book is for you. Not a book based on old fashion theories or textbook scenarios, The Millionaire Dropout is instead based on tried and tested methods of increasing personal skills, increasing your wealth, improving your life-style and releasing all the personal power that is locked up inside you. Based on the author’s firsthand experience of bootstrapping himself out of failure, The Millionaire Dropout is for anyone who wants to learn the secrets for increasing their income and their standard of living. Divided into three sections readers will walk through the stages for taking control of their life, learning how to make more money, and learning how be smart with their successes. Everyone owes it to themselves to invest a little time and effort into increasing their standard of living and releasing the personal power that is locked up inside of us all.

"A major contribution . . . on the behavior of common stocks in the United States." --Financial Analysts' Journal The consistently bestselling What Works on Wall Street explores the investment strategies that have provided the best returns over the past 50 years--and which are the top performers today. The third edition of this BusinessWeek and New York Times bestseller contains more than 50 percent new material and is designed to help you reshape your investment strategies for both the postbubble market and the dramatically changed political landscape. Packed with all-new charts, data, tables, and analyses, this updated classic allows you to directly compare popular stockpicking strategies and their results--creating a more comprehensive understanding of the intricate and often confusing investment process. Providing fresh insights into time-tested strategies, it examines: Value versus growth strategies P/E ratios versus price-to-sales Small-cap investing, seasonality, and more

Mutual-fund superstar Peter Lynch and author John Rothchild explain the basic principles of the stock market and business in an investing guide that will enlighten and entertain anyone who is high-school age or older. Many investors, including some with substantial portfolios, have only the sketchiest idea of how the stock market works. The reason, say Lynch and Rothchild, is that the basics of investing—the fundamentals of our economic system and what they have to do with the stock market—aren’t taught in school. At a time when individuals have to make important decisions about saving for college and 401(k) retirement funds, this failure to provide a basic education in investing can have tragic consequences. For those who know what to look for, investment opportunities are everywhere. The average high-school student is familiar with Nike, Reebok, McDonald’s, the Gap, and the Body Shop. Nearly every teenager in America drinks Coke or Pepsi, but only a very few own shares in either company or even understand how to buy them. Every student studies American history, but few realize that our country was settled by European colonists financed by public companies in England and Holland—and the basic principles behind public companies haven’t changed in more than three hundred years. In Learn to Earn, Lynch and Rothchild explain in a style accessible to anyone who is high-school age or older how to read a stock table in the daily newspaper, how to understand a company annual report, and why everyone should pay attention to the stock market. They explain not only how to invest, but also how to think like an investor.

40 leading venture capitalists come together to teach entrepreneurs how to succeed with their startup The Entrepreneurial Bible to Venture Capital is packed with invaluable advice about how to raise angel and venture capital funding, how to build value in a startup, and how to exit a company with maximum value for both founders and investors. It guides entrepreneurs through every step in an entrepreneurial venture from the legalities of raising initial capital to knowing when to change tactics. Andrew Romans is the co-founder and general partner of Rubicon Venture Capital, a venture capital fund that invests in privately held technology companies and enables its investors to co-invest along side the fund on a deal-by-deal basis via innovative sidecar funds right up to IPO or M&A exit. Romans is also the founder and general partner of The Founders Club, a venture capital equity exchange fund and investor in later stage liquidity transactions.

National Book Award Finalist: “This man’s ideas may be the most influential, not to say controversial, of the second half of the twentieth century.”—Columbus Dispatch At the heart of this classic, seminal book is Julian Jaynes's still-controversial thesis that human consciousness did not begin far back in animal evolution but instead is a learned process that came about only three thousand years ago and is still developing. The implications of this revolutionary scientific paradigm extend into virtually every aspect of our psychology, our history and culture, our religion—and indeed our future. “Don’t be put off by the academic title of Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Its prose is always lucid and often lyrical…he unfolds his case with the utmost intellectual rigor.”—The New York Times “When Julian Jaynes . . . speculates that until late in the twentieth millennium BC men had no consciousness but were automatically obeying the voices of the gods, we are astounded but compelled to follow this remarkable thesis.”—John Updike, The New Yorker “He is as startling as Freud was in The Interpretation of Dreams, and Jaynes is equally as adept at forcing a new view of known human behavior.”—American Journal of Psychiatry