Learn the why. Not just the what.
Investing fundamentals, market logic, and the discipline behind good decisions.
1974: The Long Returns Available at the Moment of Greatest Despair
The 1973-74 decline produced a level of pessimism so complete that equities were widely written off. The returns available to those who bought at that point were extraordinary.
The Lost Decade: Ten Years of Holding and Nothing to Show
The 2000s produced a negative total return for the broad American market over a full decade, testing the assumption that a long horizon guarantees a reward.
A Ninety-Four Percent Decline: The Price of Owning a Great Company
The businesses that produced the greatest long-term returns inflicted devastating declines along the way. Owning them was never the difficult part; keeping them was.
Missing the Best Ten Days: A Statistic That Requires Careful Handling
The best-days statistic is real but is frequently deployed misleadingly, since the symmetrical calculation for the worst days produces an equally dramatic and opposite result.
The Crashes That Never Came: The Cost of Waiting for the Fall
Predicted crashes that failed to arrive are absent from the record, yet the cost of waiting for them is real and has been substantial for those who did.
What Thirty Case Studies Have in Common
Across four centuries of financial disaster, a small number of mechanisms recur: leverage, concentration, correlation, narrative, and the substitution of price for value.