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Title: Fail-Safe Investing: Lifelong Financial Safety in 30 Minutes by Harry Browne, Andrew Morton ISBN: 0-312-24703-6 Publisher: St. Martin's Press Pub. Date: September, 1999 Format: Hardcover List Price(USD): $15.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4 (2 reviews)
Rating: 3
Summary: Great Questions, Clear Thinking, & Questionable Conclusions!
Comment: This book is almost impossible for me to rate.
If the book had stopped with raising the question about how to invest so that you had financial security, and exposed all the risks as it does, it would have been a five-star book.
If the book had only looked at the importance of assuming that the future is unpredictable, and discussed alternatives about how to reduce the risk of that unpredictability, it would have been a five-star book.
Where the book gets into trouble, is that it offers unqualified recommendations that will get you into financial trouble. I graded the book down two stars for this problem.
The book argues that you focus on your day job (your career) as task one. Very few people will ever get to the point where investments replace earned or operating business income. Most financial books skip over this very important point.
Further, the book makes the important distinction between money that you should not take risks with and money that you can afford to lose. And it reiterates that distinction often and effectively. The money you plan to retire on is money with which you should not take much risk, and the money you have saved above that you can try other things with.
I particularly admired the many ways Mr. Browne documents the likelihood that any way you learn about to "beat the market" will soon do very poorly. Although this will not be enough to discourage the inexperienced from avoiding "taking a flyer," certain lessons can only be learned the hard way by most people.
So what's the real problem with investing? Prices fluctuate . . . a lot. These fluctuations cause investors to do the wrong things. They buy high and sell low. Ouch!
Mr. Browne's solution is to put together a portfolio that will protect you against the downside circumstances of high inflation, deflation, prosperity, and deflation. Although he doesn't say it, he wants your investments to be steadier in value so you won't be tempted to buy high and sell low.
Here is where the thinking gets a little dicey. How much downside risk you need to protect against depends solely on two things: the likelihood that you will sell at the wrong time and how long you will hold the asset. So the solution will tend to differ for each person. And I'm not quite sure how anyone assesses anyone's emotional tendency to buy and sell at the wrong time.
So let's shift focus. How can you avoid taking a ride downward? In nominal terms, that's not too hard. Stay in cash. You will always get some return, and if you are holding government short-term securities (like Treasury bills) or are in a government-insured savings account, there is little risk of losing your principal. For example, in tax deferred accounts, the returns on cash now are well above inflation. So in some environments, you won't even lose buying power.
So if you are close to retirement (or needing the money), it makes sense to be almost totally or totally in cash.
If you are 20 years old, the question turns around. Over a period of 40-50 years, cash will probably earn you a lower return than any other investment you can make. But can you handle the volatility? You should probably assume that you cannot handle the volatility. So you should have a fair amount of cash too in your "investment" rather than your "speculative" funds.
But you can handle that risk, too, in another way. You can save more money than you need to retire on (or for your children's education or whatever). Then the volatility will only take you down towards the minimum sums you need to have, not take you below your targets. If this approach feels comfortable to you, it is a better solution. You will earn more money and have less lifetime risk.
There are quite a few areas where I have problems with his advice. They are too numerous to outline here, but I will mention a few:
He ideally wants you to own 25 percent of your portfolio in gold in Austria or Switzerland. First, if you are over 60, I think that's very risky. If the value of that gold goes down, you've just lost. You won't probably hold it long enough to make the loss back. Second, you will increase the chances of being audited by the IRS if you honestly declare that you have a foreign bank account. Third, you will have violated the law if you do not. Fourth, what if you and your spouse die in a car accident? Are your heirs going to find that gold? Do you really need these problems?
He also encourages you to have your money in stock mutual funds and to select three for diversification. But he doesn't give you the information you need to do that well. See John Bogle's Common Sense on Mutual Funds for help with that issue.
Finally, he recommends people you can implement that strategy with. Be skeptical of any author who presents "trustworthy" people for you to work with. There are many, many ways this advice can represent conflicts of interest, overt or sub rosa.
If a salesman told you you could have "fail-safe" results and only need to spend 30 minutes a year to do so, would you believe her or him? Where else should you be skeptical about the specifics of advice you receive.
Think through how to "emotion-reduce" and "risk-reduce" your investing!
Rating: 5
Summary: THE BEST-KEPT SECRET IN THE INVESTING WORLD...
Comment: ...according to Harry Browne, is the fact that "almost nothing turns out as expected." And yet, unlike in most other areas of their lives, in which they rightly view soothsayers as entertainers devoid of an inside track to the future justifying any go-for-broke departure from the straight and narrow of prudential common sense, somehow in the sphere of investing, perhaps driven by the fear of being "left behind" by the latest opportunities for speculative windfalls (and, need we add, spectacular losses?), millions of otherwise practical people are enchanted by one siren song or another: the claims of self-anointed "insiders" with "perfect" track records (i.e., a few lucky haphazard predictions from yesteryear masking the several dozen by the same advisor which turned sour), or the "scientific" systems of various gurus which start to fail the minute your money is on the line. By contrast, the desires of the great majority of us for the protection and enhancement of that part of our savings we cannot afford to lose as we prepare for retirement and beyond, can be best served by an investment strategy which emphasizes safety and simplicity - and which is diversified across four major investment media - stocks, bonds, gold and cash - so that, no matter what the uncertain future brings to the economy, our portfolios contain investments geared to respond well to each major trend - prosperity, inflation, tight money, or deflation. And with this strategy in place for those assets readers are counting on for their long-term survival, they still may, if they wish, speculate with that portion of their fortunes they know they can afford to lose. Ultimately, Browne's investment advice is a sound application of what, in that intoxicating book of personal philosophy which has helped so many in their quest for freedom and self-understanding, HOW I FOUND FREEDOM IN AN UNFREE WORLD (1973), he calls "The Uncertainty Trap: the urge to act as if your information were totally certain." And in their herd-based quest to sound "professional" and ahead of the competition, too many investment pundits and "experts" present themselves as "in the know" about not just why the market rose or fell today (I'm sure I'm not the only one who enjoys a great horselaugh whenever he hears broadcast reports to the effect that "the market rose today on rumors [or fears, or puffs of smoke] that..."), but what it will do tomorrow - and next year (as the always good-humored Browne points out, anyone with an authentic gift for financial prophecy wouldn't be wasting his time hawking newsletters and trading systems, or playing the talking-heads game on cable - he'd be helping the likes of George Soros and Rupert Murdoch invest a few spare billion, en route to owning his own country). Everything Browne writes merits the closest attention, and in this, his self-proclaimed last book on investing, he here presents a sort of summa of the common-sense wisdom he has garnered from thirty years of watching the rise and fall of markets - and he does so with his customary directness, clarity, and humility. He remains in a class by himself, and many of us will always be in his debt for the uncommon ideas he has expressed so ably. And above all for his own example - for the standard he has set.
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Title: Reminiscences of a Stock Operator by Edwin Lefèvre, Marketplace Books ISBN: 0471059706 Publisher: John Wiley & Sons Pub. Date: 11 May, 1994 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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