Full Title: Bull’s Eye Investing: Targeting Real Real Returns in a Smoke and Mirrors Market
Author: John Mauldin (Twitter @JohnFMauldin)
Publisher/Date: Wiley (2004)
List Cost/Pages: $35 Hardcover / 433 pages
Cover Notes:
The key to successful investing today is knowing where the markets and economy are going, not where they have been, and focusing on absolute returns––real profits in your pocket. You, the contemporary investor, instinctively know that the markets of today––and the forces that drive them––are quite different than those of past decades. Your intuition tells you that if you are to be successful in the future, you must adjust your investment strategy to reflect the new economic realities. But what strategies? What adjustments? Where can you turn for reality-based answers?
In the positive and forward-thinking Bull’s Eye Investing: Targeting Real Returns in a Smoke and Mirrors Market, financial expert John Mauldin makes a powerful case regarding the future direction of the markets and what you must do to be successful in them. Mauldin lays a solid foundation for his argument by examining six major (and very different) ways to look at the stock market as well as the numerous ways Wall Street tries to entice unknowing investors to keep buying overvalued products. Marshalling a huge array of facts and sources, Mauldin looks at these and other issues, including the effects of value, risk, market psychology, and demographics on your potential investments. He details a new approach to investing that will allow you to successfully adjust to the new reality of investing.
In a straightforward and easy-to-understand style, Mauldin helps you understand why traditional stock portfolios shouldn’t be your primary investment vehicle in the coming years, and how absolute return vehicles, such as hedge funds (Chapters 20—22), specific types of bonds, and certain types of value-oriented stocks (Chapters 16—18), and investments can help you control risk, while carefully and methodically growing your investments over the next decade.
Helping you think outside of the Wall Street box, Bull’s Eye Investing focuses on finding value and controlling risk, while working with trends (which Mauldin forecasts for you) rather than against them. It will show you why investors must focus on absolute returns instead of relative returns, as well as how research and homework will be rewarded––rather than blind trust in an ever-spiraling market.
Good markets are followed by bad markets, which are again followed by good markets. While no one can predict exactly when these markets will begin or end, there’s a pretty good chance that this cycle will continue to repeat itself. As an investor, success hinges on your understanding of these ever-changing economic and investment cycles––and your response to them. Bull’s Eye Investing can help you make the most of these trends, by showing you how to target your investments toward where the markets will be, not where they have been.