Customer Reviews

The Billion Dollar Mistake: Learning the Art of Investing Through the Missteps of Legendary Investors

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I gave it three stars. It was a good book, but not as good as it could have been. How could it have been better?
First, though the introduction indicates that the author had access to many of the investors profiled, there are precious few statements in the investors' own words about what THEY THINK about their mistakes. It seemed like most of the book was just culled from newspaper accounts.
Second, I don't know specifically how the author could have avoided this (admittedly, it's the point of the book I suppose), but I'm uncomfortable with the idea of the guy on the sidelines employing 20/20 hindsight to critique the missteps of the guy who was actually in the arena. A great book called the Halo Effect makes the compelling case that so much supposed business analysis is simply ex post narration of what happened as though it was inevitable (if a new product works, they were bold and smart, if it fails, they "strayed from their core competencies"). For instance, in the Cooperman chapter, Cooperman is criticized for playing in an inefficient market with little information. But that's the whole point: homeruns are found in inefficient markets where no one is looking. If he had been right, we'd all say he was a genius. I guess what I'm saying is that I resist the notion that there is always some folly or brilliance at work in a given investment.
Although I'm skeptical that each mistake can be distilled down to pithy truths as the book implies, I still think it's worth reading. The biographical backgrounds in each chapter are interesting and inspiring to any aspiring investor, and the reader will gain insights into how each investor approaches investing generally, even if that's a more complicated thing than a few bullet points can convey.

This book is a fabulous idea and takes an interesting approach. Mistakes are by far the most valuable part of an investors education. I thought it would be great to tack a few billion of some others "education" money onto the large stack of my own. After reading Weiss' bio on the jacket extolling how smart the author seemed to be, I was anticipating a professional-grade read on some major wiffs.

What I got was some excellent content punctuated with editing errors and a few annoying mistakes. (Azerbaijani is plural), or the following set of words oddly attempting to describe active and passive investing from page 70 (capitalization mistake included from book): "The active investor is the volleyer, hitting shots off a short bounce while trying for a wide range of angles And the activist investor?" ....Huh?....poor activist investor has enough to worry about without having the active investor hit tennis balls at him!!

Make no mistake the content of this book is excellent, but many things are aimed and introductory level investors which may be frustrating to readers with more advanced knowledge of investments. One rather glaring mistake is the author's misrepresentation of the performance of levered short ETF's.....page 188

"If a trader is really bearish, DXD is the fund to buy since it is levered to multiply the downward move on the DOW twofold. That means that for every dollar that the DJIA trades lower, DXD will trade higher by $2"
--A vast oversimplification and is patently untrue, for reasons the author should be very familiar with, but I'll spare you the details of here (has to do with volatility, rates and the square root of time...ooo)

Overall, I found the book well worth the time and money, but I just got frustrated a bunch of times with some simple details that should have been caught in the editing process....

Like golfers and fishermen, professional investors love talking about their greatest successes. However, as an investor I rarely find value in reading backslapping accounts of trades that made some investor wildly rich.

Thankfully, "The Billion Dollar Mistake" is NOT one of those investor victory parades. Far from it.

Author and Wall Street veteran Stephen L. Weiss has taken precisely the opposite tack, with great results. In "The Billion Dollar Mistake", he chronicles the single worst trade made by each of a dozen or so legendary investors. It's a well-researched set of cautionary tales. I enjoyed and learned from them.

That this book exists at all seems remarkable. Weiss has gotten some of the world's leading money managers and industrialists to talk about their most embarrassing fumbles. I can't imagine that these investors wanted to revisit their biggest professional mistakes, but they do here. It's fascinating to read what they have to say about their worst investing errors. The details are captivating.

This book is much more than simply an enjoyable read. The stories hammer home some important investing rules: Do your own homework. Spread your bets. Be careful with margin. Use derivatives like options sparingly. Respect market volatility. Avoid crowded trades.

An even more important message comes from reading one after another of these massive miscues: Watch out, investors, hubris is always lurking. Weiss shows that each of these legendary professionals strayed dangerously from the investment discipline that made them successful. To me, these mistakes weren't about greed, they were about ego and infallibility. At some point, flush with years of success, each investor seemed to decide that his trade had to be right if he himself was willing to make it. History proved each to be dead wrong.

"The Billion Dollar Mistake" is a savvy and fresh look at markets, investing and human nature.

What a great book A fun read . I learned more about investing from this book than any other . I can`t believe that people worth billions made the same mistakes I made. Boy if I had read this before 2008 I would have saved a ton of money great gift to give to a friend

Steven weiss is a very smart man and this book only proves my point. Billion Dollar Mistake is brilliantly written book. Very easy to read.Is devided into different sections of all the great hedge fund managers and mistakes they made.As warren buffett says Gambling is mathematically unintellegent activity.
whether you loose a penny or billion dollar its a sin to loose money.Why not learn from this book and from mistakes of others and not repeat it ourselves. Pick up the book.It changed my thinking.

"Why explore the mistakes these very, very wealthy investors have made? That's simple: so you can try to avoid them. For the fact is that although these mistakes were committed by extremely successful and well-known pros, they are common, garden-variety investment mistakes -- the same garden-variety mistakes average, everyday investors make. Only the scale is larger."
- Stephen Weiss, The Billion Dollar Mistake: Learning the Art of Investing Through the Missteps of Legendary Investors

Weiss spent many years on Wall Street. (One of the fascinating side notes on Weiss is that he was supposed to be on United Flight 93 on Sept. 11, 2001 -- but decided to postpone the trip at the last minute.) He recounts many mishaps. Weiss then draws some lessons from each of these episodes, trying to figure out how these smart investors got things so catastrophically wrong.

Review by a writer for Agora Financial, publisher of economic and financial analysis including Financial Reckoning Day Fallout: Surviving Today's Global Depression, The New Empire of Debt: The Rise and Fall of an Epic Financial Bubble, and I.O.U.S.A.: One Nation. Under Stress. In Debt.

This is by far the best investment book I have ever read, and the reason is simple; it doesn"t read like one. However, there is no doubt as to the substance of this book. Despite the huge entertainment value, I learned an incredible amount about my own investing habits and actually caught myself before making one of the mistakes detailed in the Kerkorkian chapter. That saved me many multiples of the amount I paid for the book.

Unless Weiss is friends with every billionaire in the world, it's hard to believe he got these interviews. It's amazing that he got these icons of the investment world to open up and be so candid about these huge gaffes. Egos are big on Wall Street, not even the greatest interviewers have gotten these investors to to 'open up'. Weiss either is the most charming interviewer or secretes truth serum. This business book kept my interest, I couldn't put down....Chekov move over. Usually I have to read these books in small doses, but the life stories of these 'experts' and how they became so successful was fascinating. The way Weiss describes the investors it was like I was in the room with them. I could almost smell the sweat. Actually, did these guys even break a sweat when they realized how much they were going to lose? The book is interesting, fun, and a must read for anyone who has ever invested; if you are trading daily, or just making those mundane weekly deposits in your 401k.

If John Grisham ever wrote a book on investing, this would be it, especially the chapter on billionaire Lee Cooperman and the Pirate of Prague. The KGB, duffle bags full of cash, the Pirate on the lam from the US and the Czechs - sounds more like a thriller than a lesson on investing in emerging markets. And the chapter on Nick Maounis has similar intrigue. He lost $6 billion in a matter of weeks and is now suing JP Morgan for a billion dollars for conspiring against him. The lesson there is not to buy anything that you can't sell. I never even picked up a book on investing since I never ever had any real interest but my daughter is about to graduate college and seems headed for Wall Street so I wanted to be able to hold a conversation with her. I read previews of other investment books and they all seemed so dry - I started to get sleepy just from reading the descriptions. This one caught my attention when I read an interview with the author. My husband, who is in sales management, is reading it now and he can't put it down. I actually learned a lot.

Fantastic! Inspirational and practical at the same time. I never thought of myself in the same domain as these people and now I see that there are concepts that apply to us all. To how we live. To how we invest. Stephen Weiss brings a gigantic and potentially overwhelming world down to basic and understandable principles by which we all can live ... and prosper. I'm so glad I ventured into this seemingly foreign territory! I highly recommend this book.