In Enrich Your Future: The Keys to Successful Investing, prolific author and investor Larry Swedroe shines light on the foundation of modern investing, enabling readers to create winning portfolios through simple yet effective strategies. Through a combination of analogies, personal anecdotes, and empirical evidence from peer reviewed journals, the book clearly explains how to play the winner’s game, instead of simply following the crowd, speculating, and making brokers and fund families wealthy in the process.
The book begins by first explaining how to put your portfolio on the right path, then how to keep a steady course during market uncertainty, when many investors fall victim to human nature, lose perspective, and make incorrect investment decisions based on fear and greed.
In this book, readers will learn: - How prices of securities are established and why it's so difficult to outperform on a risk-adjusted basis - How to navigate various key decision points when designing your portfolio - How to develop a conceptually sound investment strategy and reach your financial goals faster - How playing the winner’s game in investing will improve the quality of your life as well.
Revealing the true nature of the modern financial market and changing the way readers approach investing in general, Enrich Your Future: The Keys to Successful Investing is an essential guide for individual investors and financial advisors seeking to make more informed and prudent investment decisions.
Table of Contents
Also by Larry E. Swedroe xiii
Foreword xvii
Introduction xxiii
Part One: How Markets Work: How Security Prices Are Determined and Why It’s So Difficult to Outperform
Chapter 1: The Determinants of the Risk and Return of Stocks and Bonds 3
Chapter 2: How Markets Set Prices 9
Chapter 3: Persistence of Performance 27
Chapter 4: Why Is Persistent Outperformance So Hard to Find? 35
Chapter 5: Great Companies Do Not Make High- Return Investments 39
Chapter 6: Market Efficiency and the Case of Pete Rose 47
Chapter 7: The Value of Security Analysis 51
Chapter 8: Be Careful What You Ask For 55
Chapter 9: The Fed Model and the Money Illusion 59
Part Two: Strategic Portfolio Decisions
Chapter 10: When Even the Best Aren’t Likely to Win the Game 67
Chapter 11: The Demon of Chance 73
Chapter 12: Outfoxing the Box 79
Chapter 13: Between a Rock and a Hard Place 83
Chapter 14: Stocks Are Risky No Matter How Long the Horizon 87
Chapter 15: Individual Stocks Are Riskier Than Investors Believe 91
Chapter 16: All Crystal Balls Are Cloudy 97
Chapter 17: There Is Only One Way to See Things Rightly 105
Chapter 18: Black Swans and Fat Tails 109
Chapter 19: Is Gold a Safe Haven Asset? 115
Chapter 20: A Higher Intelligence 121
Part Three: Behavioral Finance: We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Us
Chapter 21: You Can’t Handle the Truth 127
Chapter 22: Some Risks Are Not Worth Taking 133
Chapter 23: Framing the Problem 137
Chapter 24: Why Do Smart People Do Dumb Things? 143
Chapter 25: Battles Are Won Before They Are Fought 153
Chapter 26: Dollar Cost Averaging 161
Chapter 27: Pascal’s Wager and the Making of Prudent Decisions 167
Chapter 28: Buy, Hold, or Sell, and the Endowment Effect 173
Chapter 29: The Drivers of Investor Behavior 177
Chapter 30: The Economically Irrational Investor Preference for Dividend- Paying Stocks 185
Chapter 31: The Uncertainty of Investing 193
Part Four: Playing the Winner’s Game in Life and Investing
Chapter 32: The 20- Dollar Bill 199
Chapter 33: An Investor’s Worst Enemy 205
Chapter 34: Bear Markets 211
Chapter 35: Mad Money 219
Chapter 36: Fashions and Investment Folly 227
Chapter 37: Sell in May and Go Away 233
Chapter 38: Chasing Spectacular Fund Performance 235
Chapter 39: Enough 239
Chapter 40: The Big Rocks 243
Chapter 41: A Tale of Two Strategies 249
Chapter 42: How to Identify an Advisor You Can Trust 253
Conclusion 257
Appendix A: Implementation: Recommended Investment Vehicles 261
Notes 271
Acknowledgments 285
Index 287
