Beat the Crowd: How You Can Out-Invest the Herd by Thinking Differently (Hardcover)

Preface ix

Chapter 1: Your Braini¿½]Training Guide 1

Wall Street’s Contrarian Contradiction 4

The Curmudgeon’s Conundrum 5

There Is Always a But 6

Why Most Investors Are Mostly Wrong Most of the Time 8

The First Rule of True Contrarianism 12

The All-Seeing Market 13

Different, Not Opposite 14

The Right Frame of Mind 15

Check Your Ego 16

Chapter 2: For Whom the Bell Curve Tolls 19

Wall Street’s Useless/Useful Fascination With Calendars 23

Professional Groupthink 25

How the Contrarian Uses

Professional Forecasts 26

Even the Best Fall Sometimes . . . 30

How to Beat the Street 39

Chapter 3: Dracula and the Four Horsemen of the Media Apocalypse 47

The Media’s Flawed Financial Eyesight 50

Dracula Around the Corner 53

Looking for Growth in All the Wrong Places 59

The Magic Indicator 62

War—What Is It Good For? 71

Don’t Be a Cow, Be a Contrarian 77

Chapter 4: Not in the Next 30 Months 81

Baby Boomer Bomb? 85

What About Social Security and Medicare? 86

But What if the “Lost Generation”Stays Lost? 90

What About Debt? 93

But What if Debt Causes Runaway Inflation? 98

But What if America Stops Innovating? 98

But What About Global Warming? 100

What About Income Inequality? 102

What if the Dollar Loses Its Place as the World’s Reserve Currency? 105

What the Markets Know 108

Chapter 5: Take a Safari With Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau 111

How the Elephant Got Its Tusks 114

Dumbo, Gross Margins and Other Highi¿½]Flying Elephants 116

When Good News Dresses Up as Bad News 118

The Yield Curve Curveball 121

When Elephants Attack 127

A Brief History of Tragedy 127

When Textbooks Lie 129

It Can’t Be an Elephant If … 134

Chapter 6: The Chapter You’ll Love to Hate 137

Step 1: Ditch Your Biases 140

My Guy Is Best, Your Guy Is Worst and Other Unhelpful Opinions 141

A Magical Elephant Named Gridlock 145

(Not) Just a Bill Sittin’ on Capitol Hill 150

That Which Is Seen and That Which Is Unseen 156

What’s Worse Than a Politician? 158

Why the Government Already Made the Next Crisis Worse 162

Chapter 7: Put Those Textbooks Away 169

Don’t Toss Your Textbooks—But Know Their Limitations! 172

The First Commandment: P/Es Aren’t Predictive 175

The CAPEd Crusader Is No Superhero 178

Small Beats All? 181

Fancy Formulas and Other Academic Kryptonite 184

Theory Isn’t Reality 189

If Not School, Where? 193

Chapter 8: Throw Away This Book! 197

Miley Cyrus, Justin Bieber and Pop Star Economists 200

Classics Are Classic for a Reason 203

Philosophy and Econ 101 209

How to Learn From the Legends 216

Those Who Forget History . . . 225

Classics in the Twentyi¿½]First Century 230

Chapter 9: When Miley Cyrus Meets Ben Graham: Misadventures in Behavioral Finance 235

Where It All Began 238

The Beginnings of Behavioral Finance’s Drift 240

When Academics Met Capitalism and Marketing 240

Behavioral Finance and Tactical Positioning 242

Recency Bias and Sentiment 251

How to Gain a Tactical Advantage With Behavioral Finance 254

A Section for Stock Pickers 259

Know When to Say When 266

Getting Back to Selfi¿½]Control 268

Chapter 10: The Negative Myopic Media 277

How to Use the News 281

What the Media Always Misses 285

In Technology (and Capitalism) We Trust 289

Parting Thoughts 290

Index 293