What's next? How about Getting Back to Business?
My prior book was either totally wrong or way too early. Please take a look and let me know which one.
Six years ago, I published a historical contextualization of Modern Portfolio Theory. It was a constructive criticism of how MPT is used today. The argument ended by outlining an alternative approach to portfolio management based on income streams, not asset prices. The response was near utter silence. In contrast, my most recent book has gotten substantial traction in the media and the practitioner community. The topics of the two works are, of course, different, but I think that there are other reasons why one has done well and the other has not.
First, in 2018, interest rates were still going down, the market was still going up, and the early cracks in the global neo-liberal paradigm had not yet signaled a definitive end to the unfettered march of capital. Why rock the boat. Everything was fine. And a portfolio approach based on income streams didn’t make much sense when there were no income streams to be had, just ever rising asset prices.
Second, I had no platform. That was one publisher’s explanation for the flop. Without social media, there could be no marketing. The tree fell in the forest and no one heard it.
I will also acknowledge a third possibility—that the earlier work just wasn’t very good.
But I don’t think the third explanation is so. And the conditions surrounding the first two reasons have now changed. Interest rates have stopped going down. And traditional portfolio theory has taken it on the chin the past few years without the tailwind of declining rates. It now makes sense to at least consider alternative approaches to portfolio construction, including those based on once-again material income streams.
And, for better or for worse, I’ve spent the past half decade building up a modest social media presence to propagate my ideas. HistoryInvestor finally has a platform, albeit not the largest or the loudest.
So I’d ask you to take a look at Getting Back to Business. and let me know what you think of it.
And I want to thank the few, the brave who did note it at the time. They include
, Jan van Eck, Tariq Dennison, Marty Fridson, among a handful of others. (If I have overlooked you, please remind me and I will happily add you to the list.) And thanks to the then editors at McGraw-Hill Professional, Noah Schwartzberg and Donya Dickerson, who got the book over the finish line. They have both since moved on, but I hope their earlier efforts will not ultimately have been in vain.