Atruvia AG
Bull's Eye Investing
Book

Bull's Eye Investing

Targeting Real Returns in a Smoke and Mirrors Market

John Mauldin
Wiley, 2004
Buy book or audiobook

Read or listen offline

Amazon Kindle
auto-generated audio
  • 0.5×
  • 0.75×
  • 1×
  • 1.25×
  • 1.5×
  • 1.75×
1×
auto-generated audio

Editorial Rating

9

Qualities

  • Innovative
  • Applicable

Recommendation

This is a very good book about investing and market behavior. Readers should be forewarned that author John Mauldin may have some bias in that he is an advisor and money manager with a big commodities practice. Nevertheless, pay close attention to his evidence and the case he expounds here. Mauldin marshals numerous studies to indicate that a secular extended bear market is upon us and that it may be a long, long time before stock markets recover strength and surpass their present levels in inflation-adjusted terms. He suggests that a further drop of as much as 50% may be in the cards and, in case you aren't already scared, he supports his contention with solid evidence. Mauldin offers you a number of plausible alternatives for managing your money. getAbstract.com finds that one of his book's great merits is that it calls attention to a potentially dark scenario that most investment coverage ignores.

Summary

The Bear

We have entered a radically different time. This is a time in which no one will talk about a "new economy" or laws of economics that are fundamentally alien to the laws that have governed the market throughout history. The market moves in long steps, sometimes as long as 20 years. Experts use the term "secular" — from the Latin word "saecula," which means age or era — to describe a very long bull or bear market. The last secular bear market stretched from the late 1960s to the 1980s. Stocks did not make any inflation-adjusted gains during this period. Then a secular bull market ensued, lasting from the 1980s until 2000 or thereabouts. This secular bull market took stocks to ultimately unsustainable heights during the great mania of the dot-com bubble. History indicates that we are due for another secular bear market.

During the secular bull market, investors became enamored of modern portfolio theory and its offshoot, the capital asset pricing model. Many investors who knew nothing about these theories nonetheless invested according to their dictates. Essentially, these theories say that stock price movements are random and unpredictable, and that most...

About the Author

John Mauldin is president of Millennium Wave Advisors, LLC, an investment advisory firm, and president of Millennium Wave Securities, LLC, a member of the NASD. He is also a commodity pool operator, a commodity-trading advisor and an introducing broker.

Comment on this summary