Treasury-stock

The book covers thirty general categories, styles or concepts in investing and then uses the following technique; first, Mr. LeBaron will introduce the subject, displaying a high level of knowledge that he has acquired through his 30+ year investing career (along with Romesh Vaitlingam). Then he introduces a guru for the particular topic, such as Warren Buffett for value investing. Then as "Counterpoint", he mentions weaknesses of the concept or technique. Most entertaining is "Guru Response", where the aforementioned guru gets to attack his critics; and finally a wrap-up called "Where Next", where Dean summarizes the topic and perhaps sometimes gets in a few digs at gurus he disagrees with.

I did get the sense that Dean is on a first-name basis with all of these gurus, and it undoubtedly helped in creating a book of this type. The chapters are brief and do not need to be read sequentially, just pick the topic you are interested and run with it. Particularly helpful are the references at the end of each chapter which suggest further reading. Somewhat amusing, however, is the procedure of listing a book multiple times if it relates to multiple topics - at times the references seemed like an advertisement for Bernstein's "Capital Ideas".

Readers will learn enough to get started on a topic and perhaps for an engaging cocktail-party conversation, but to really understand something they of course will need to move on to the references, and I think that is the book's intention.

Partisans may feel that he did not cover their favored topic well enough, such as "short selling" or "technical analysis". I myself felt that the chapter on Value Investing seemed weak. Although Buffett may be the most famous current proponent of value investing, I think he may have spent too much time defending his own particular flavor of value investing, and that to get a better introduction to the topic they might have used an additional guru or two (I suppose Benjamin Graham doesn't qualify because he is dead and couldn't have written a "Guru Response" section - pity.).

Also, the topics are skewed towards big-concept, guru-think type categories such as "international money" which I suppose are entirely justified but seem more weighted towards what people are thinking about at annual retreats at Davos, Switzerland than what a middle-of-the-road investor worries about. I would like to have seen a chapter on Small Cap Stocks, perhaps with Ralph Wanger as a guru, or on a practical topic like how to avoid getting ripped off by an unscrupulous broker.

This book gave me inspirations for the next ten books I'd like to read.

I agree with much of what has already been said as far as the amount of filler and the editorial glitches. And can anyone figure out the last chart -- table 11.1? These numbers make no sense and don't even correspond with the info on table 9.1. I began the book with some excitement but ended up feeling very uncertain about the method.

I think the ideas in this book are absolutely crucial to investors, but I'm dissappointed by its inconsistencies & omissions. There is no concrete demonstration of how O'Higgins arrived at such spectacular returns, for example, in a particular year, by investing in zero-coupon bonds. 24% annual return is awesome, but it would be nice to see an example of how this would happen in a particular year, some hard data for the novice investor to see (not just total annual returns, year by year). Especially someone (like me) who knows virtually nothing about bonds are finds it hard to beleive that this "safe" investment could provide an 80% return in _one year_. He does not go through even one example to illustrate the process of allocation of his portfolio, so there are some details that I have not figured out after several readings. He also suggests in his section about stocks that he will later explain how to invest in small-caps, since they outperform blue-chips over time, but he never does, at least not in _this_ book! (Maybe this book was pieced together from sections of his old book, Beating the Dow?) I am deeply suspicious that no one edited this book as a whole work, that it was a cut-and-paste job with some new chapters on bonds.

Some information he provides like pieces of a puzzle and later uses, expecting the reader to put the pieces together. An example is the use of the change in the price of gold as an indicator of inflation, about which one of the earlier reviews complained.

Rather than taking on faith many of his derivations, I think I'm going to have to do some more research before I follow this strategy. That's my main gripe -- there is still work for me to do after reading this book, to confirm the annual percentages and cumulative returns that he claims. I am, however, convinced by this book of the value of bonds in an investment portfolio, and of the importance of contrarianism when it comes to investing.

This is one of the few stock market books from the 1990s that will be read and appreciated many years from now. While silly stuff like "Dow 36,000" & Harry Dent quickly withers away, O'Higgins advice gains credibility every day in this apparently multi-year bear market. Several web sites (beartopia dot com & others) mention this book. Perhaps the book's title should have substituted "zero coupon bonds" for the word "bonds." Do look up the authors corrected list of investment steps here at Amazon, however, do not let the slightly sloppy editing deter you from learning this powerful investment advice. The more knowledgable one is of the market, the more one appreciates O'Higgins and his two works. This book's advice works in bull and bear markets.