Foundations for Scientific Investing: Capital Markets Intuition and Critical Thinking Skills

[Note: eBook version of latest edition now available; see Amazon author page for details.] Every investor needs capital markets intuition and critical thinking skills to conduct confident, deliberate, and skeptical investment. The overarching goal of this book is to help investors build these skills.

This revised 13th edition is the product of 25+ years of investment research and experience (academic, personal, and professional), and 20+ painstaking years of destructive testing in university classrooms. Although the topic is applied investments, the integration of finance, economics, accounting, pure mathematics, statistics, numerical techniques, and spreadsheets (or programming) make this an ideal capstone course at the advanced undergraduate or masters/MBA level. The book has a heavily scientific/quantitative focus, but the material should be accessible to a motivated practitioner or talented individual investor with (for the most part) only high school level mathematics or intermediate level university mathematics. Although aimed at the advanced undergraduate or masters/MBA level, the careful explanations of a wide range of advanced capital markets topics makes this an excellent book for a U.S. PhD student in need of an easily accessible foundation course in capital markets theory and practice.

There are literature reviews of multiple advanced areas. More than 30 unanswered research questions are identified; these research questions would be ideal for a master’s thesis or a chapter of a PhD. The applied nature of the book also makes it ideal for capital markets practitioners. For example, in one exercise, the reader is taken by the hand and walked through construction of a worked spreadsheet example of an active alpha optimization using actual stock market data. (The reader gets to build ex-ante alphas, and feed them into an optimization that weighs returns, risk, and transaction costs. A portfolio is rebalanced based on the optimization, and ultimately a backtest is conducted to measure ex post alpha.) Other practitioner material includes advanced time value of money exercises, a review of retirement topics, extensive discussions of dividends, P/E ratios, transaction costs, the CAPM, value versus growth versus glamour versus income, and a review of more than 100 years of stock market performance and more than 200 years of interest rates.

There are 72 ＂Quant Quizzes,＂ containing over 100 individual questions. Each is designed to reinforce key ideas. There are also more than 10 ＂You Need to Know＂ boxes, each of which focuses on an important point that is often taught poorly or overlooked completely in university courses. Special attention is paid to more difficult topics like construction of Student-t statistics, the Roll critique, smart beta, factor-based investing, the Fama-French critique, and Grinold-Kahn versus Black-Litterman models (note that a hybrid Grinold-Kahn/Black-Litterman model is introduced). A key diagram shows how the following models are related to each other: Martingale, Random Walk, ABM, GBM, APT, CAPM, Markowitz, Tobin, Zero-Beta CAPM, Black-Scholes, Bachelier, etc. Another key diagram identifies participants in securities lending transactions that stand behind any short sale of stock. Also, the Roll Critique and the Black Zero-Beta CAPM are both generalized to reference portfolios that are not necessarily fully invested. The list of references has over 1,000 items from the academic and practitioner literature and the extensive index has over 9,500 entries. Finally, note that a separate book with more than 700 classroom-tested questions exists to accompany this book.