Beat the Crowd

Preface ix Chapter 1: Your Brain?]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 High?]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 Twenty?]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 Self?]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