Book Bits | 8 December 2018

Delivering Alpha: Lessons from 30 Years of Outperforming Investment Benchmarks
By Hilda Ochoa-Brillembourg
Summary via Amazon
From a former World Bank Executive and renowned investor―a detailed roadmap to adding consistent, sustainable value to globally diversified portfolios. For many investors, alpha is akin to the Holy Grail. Risk-adjusted returns above benchmarks―alpha―are particularly challenging to achieve even with a sound strategy. Hilda Ochoa-Brillembourg is an expert on alpha. Over the past four decades, she and her team consistently exceeded benchmarks and delivered appreciable value added on their investments. In Delivering Alpha, she reveals the principles and methods employed in her investment strategies, along with insights drawn from her personal life. She shows how timing, market awareness, price, and relative value to the investor are critical drivers of effective investment decisions. Ochoa-Brillembourg also debunks common investment myths that often trip up both new and experienced investors.

The Future of Capitalism: Facing the New Anxieties
By Paul Collier
Summary via publisher (Harper Collins)
From world-renowned economist Paul Collier, a candid diagnosis of the failures of capitalism and a pragmatic and realistic vision for how we can repair it. Deep new rifts are tearing apart the fabric of the United States and other Western societies: thriving cities versus rural counties, the highly skilled elite versus the less educated, wealthy versus developing countries. As these divides deepen, we have lost the sense of ethical obligation to others that was crucial to the rise of post-war social democracy. So far these rifts have been answered only by the revivalist ideologies of populism and socialism, leading to the seismic upheavals of Trump, Brexit, and the return of the far-right in Germany. We have heard many critiques of capitalism but no one has laid out a realistic way to fix it, until now.

Stay the Course: The Story of Vanguard and the Index Revolution
By John C. Bogle
Summary via publisher (Wiley)
Stay the Course is the story the Vanguard Group as told by its founder, legendary investor John C. Bogle. This engrossing book traces the history of Vanguard—the largest mutual fund organization on earth. Offering the world’s first index mutual fund in 1976, John Bogle led Vanguard from a $1.4 billion firm with a staff of 28 to a global company of 16,000 employees and with more than $5 trillion in assets under management. An engaging blend of company history, investment perspective, and personal memoir, this book provides a fascinating look into the mind of an extraordinary man and the company he created.

The Inclusive Economy: How to Bring Wealth to America’s Poor
By Michael D. Tanner
Summary via publisher (Cato Institute)
The Inclusive Economy: How to Bring Wealth to America’s Poor energetically challenges the conventional wisdom of both the right and the left that underlies much of the contemporary debate over poverty and welfare policy. Author and national public policy expert Michael Tanner takes to task conservative critiques of a “culture of poverty” for their failure to account for the structural circumstances in which the poor live. In addition, he criticizes liberal calls for fighting poverty primarily through greater redistribution of wealth and new government programs. Rather than engaging in yet another debate over which government programs should be increased or decreased by billions of dollars, Tanner calls for an end to policies that have continued to push people into poverty. Combining social justice with limited government, his plan includes reforming the criminal justice system and curtailing the War on Drugs, bringing down the cost of housing, reforming education to give more control and choice to parents, and making it easier to bank, save, borrow, and invest.