Successful Investing Is a Process

Book excerpt: A process-driven approach to investment management that lets you achieve the same high gains as the most successful portfolio managers, but at half the cost What do you pay for when you hire a portfolio manager? Is it his or her unique experience and expertise, a set of specialized analytical skills possessed by only a few? The truth, according to industry insider Jacques Lussier, is that, despite their often grandiose claims, most successful investment managers, themselves, can't properly explain their successes. In this book Lussier argues convincingly that most of the gains achieved by professional portfolio managers can be accounted for not by special knowledge or arcane analytical methodologies, but proper portfolio management processes whether they are aware of this or not. More importantly, Lussier lays out a formal process-oriented approach proven to consistently garner most of the excess gains generated by traditional analysis-intensive approaches, but at a fraction of the cost since it could be fully implemented internally. Profit from more than a half-century's theoretical and empirical literature, as well as the author's own experiences as a top investment strategist Learn an approach, combining several formal management processes, that simplifies portfolio management and makes its underlying qualities more transparent, while lowering costs significantly Discover proven methods for exploiting the inefficiencies of traditional benchmarks, as well as the behavioral biases of investors and corporate management, for consistently high returns Learn to use highly-efficient portfolio management and rebalancing methodologies and an approach to diversification that yields returns far greater than traditional investment programs