Review – Professional Investor Rules (#investing, @harrimanhouse, #WallSt)

Professional Investor Rules: Top Investors Reveal The Secrets of Their Success (buy on Amazon.com)

by various, introduction by Jonathan Davis, published 2013

A “valueprax” review always serves two purposes: to inform the reader, and to remind the writer. Find more reviews by visiting the Virtual Library. Please note, I received a copy of this book for review from the publisher, Harriman House, on a complimentary basis.

The many faces of money management

A 1948 Academy Award-winning film popularized the slogan “There are eight million stories in the Naked City”, and after reading the eclectic “Professional Investor Rules”, I’m beginning to think there are almost as many stories about how to manage money properly.

Value and growth, momentum and macro-geography, market-timing and voodoo superstition; all these major investment strategies and themes are on display, and many more to boot, and all come bearing their own often-tortured metaphors to convey their point.

What’s more, it seems the pacing and style of the book change along with the advice-giver: while some of the entries follow the books eponymous “rule” format for organizing their thoughts, others involve myths, lengthy prose paragraph-laden essays and headings with sub-headings. Some have charts, and some do not.

One things consistent, at least– all the advisors profiled contradict one another at some point or other, and some even manage to contradict themselves in their own sections.

But it’s got this going for it, which is nice

Those are some of the glaring cons to the book. It’s not entirely without it’s pros, however.

One of the things I liked about the book is, ironically, also one of its flaws– the great variety of personas. They run the gamut from the known to the unknown, the mainstream to the contrarian, the sell-side to the buy-side. This book is published by a UK outfit (Harriman House), which means many of the professional soothsayers will be unfamiliar to US audiences, but it also means you get a selection of icons from the Commonwealth and former British territories (such as Hong Kong and other Asia-based managers) that you’d likely never hear about on CNBC or other American publishing sources.

Following this contrarian inversion theme, I liked that all the phony  fuzzy thinkers were right there next to the sharper pencils because it made their baloney that much more rotten. I think this is a great service for an uninformed investor picking up this book. If they had come across some of the more foppish money dandies on their own, elsewhere, they’d be liable to get taken in and swindled like the thousands of others who sustain such frauds. But at least in this case you’ve got a go-go glamour guy saying no price is too high for a growing company right next to a value guy warning that that way lies the path to certain, eventual doom.

And maybe this isn’t a big deal to others but I like the packaging on this hardcover edition I’ve got– it’s truly a HANDy size, the fonts and color scheme are modern and eye-catching and the anecdotal organization of the book makes it easy to pick up and put down without feeling too upset over whether or not you’ve got the time to commit to a serious read right then.

Fave five

Here are five of my favorite ideas from the book, along with the person(s) who said it:

1. At any one time, a few parts of your portfolio will be doing terribly… focus on the performance of the portfolio as a whole (William Bernstein, Efficient Frontier Advisors)
2. Far more companies have failed than succeeded (Marc Faber, The Gloom, Boom and Doom Report)
3. Fight the consensus, not the fundamentals (Max King, Investec Asset Management)
4. When someone says ‘it’s not about the money,’ it’s about the money (H.L. Mencken… consequently not actually a money manager and not alive, but it was quoted in one of the in-betweens spacing out the chapters)
5. Academics never rescind papers and never get fired (Robin Pabrook and Lee King Fuei, Schroeders Fund, Asia)

Conclusion

Who is this book for? Accomplished, well-read pro-am investors will find nothing new here and much they disagree with, so I’d recommend such readers stay away. Someone completely new to investing and the money management industry might find the book valuable as a current snapshot of the gamut of strategic strains present in the money management industry.

Overall, while “Professional Investor Rules” has its moments, overall I came away less enthused than I did with Harriman House’s earlier offering, Free Capital. For anyone looking to learn investing techniques from accomplished, self-made millionaires, that’s the book I’d point them to– the advice therein is worth multiples of that being given by the mass of asset gathering managers of OPM contained in this one.