The Investor's Manifesto Preparing for Prosperity, Armageddon, and Everything in Between
, by Bernstein, William J.; Clements, Jonathan
- ISBN: 9781118073766 | 1118073762
- Cover: Paperback
- Copyright: 8/28/2012
As the Twenty-first century dawns, our country, to author Bill Bernstein's great surprise and agitation, somehow expects schoolteachers and factory workers to manage their own investment and retirement portfolios. This is akin, in his view, to having airline customers fly their own airliners or expecting parents to remove a child's inflamed appendix. This is not hyperbole: in the course of his professional life, Bernstein actually has flown aircraft, practiced a complex medical specialty, and managed money. He has found the last vocation to be fully as difficult as the first two. Simply put, our current retirement system is a travesty; forcing the average American to save, invest, retire, and then spend down their own portfolios is a hopeless conservative libertarian conceit. Only now, with the market's recent collapse, have the full costs of this cruel joke on John Q. American become apparent. Unfortunately, for the present most citizens now find such plans their investment mainstay, and they need to know how to rationally respond to this predicament. This book will describe just how to plan a lifetime of investing, drilling down on the "nature inside the beast" that we know as stocks and bonds, and the relationship between risk and return. Naturally, there will be a strong focus of the meaning of the current market maelstrom, and the path out. Such material is often deadly for investors with little professional experience, but Bernstein believes Mr. Market may no longer be the cold portfolio assassin he was in 2008. He artfully focuses on the concept of Pascal's Wager--identifying and avoiding worst-case scenarios. After reading Timeless Investing, investors truly will understand the nuts and bolts of executing a lifetime investment plan: how to survive dealing with the investment industry, the practical meaning of market efficiency (not trying to time markets, pick stocks, or select individual fund managers), how much to save, how to maintain discipline in the face of panics and manias, and what vehicles to use to achieve financial security and freedom.
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