Customer Reviews

The Small-Cap Advantage: How Top Endowments and Foundations Turn Small Stocks into Big Returns (Wiley Finance)

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Brian Bares' book, the Small-Cap Advantage, was a great read for anyone interested in small-cap investing. The content is innovative and informative, but easy to understand and digest with clear examples and visuals. Small caps seem to be overlooked or ignored by many, and the inefficiency created by this creates a powerful advantage for anyone willing to do their homework and focus.

Like other experts whose opinions I trust, the author avoids any sense of investing magic or super-systems. Rather, he focuses on an under-served (and therefore inefficient) market and then does his homework to make investments.

For anyone interested in learning more about the competitive advantage that can be achieved with a focus on this area, I'd highly recommend it.

The Small-Cap Advantage is a must read for anyone intent on generating superior investment returns in an area of the market that frequently flies below the radar of large investment funds. Brian Bares takes the reader through all the issues a professional investor focused on small caps is likely to encounter, dispensing invaluable data and advice in the process. I can't imagine anyone better to write this much-needed volume than Brian Bares, one of the most highly regarded small-cap "superinvestors" of his generation.

This well written book should be on the reading list of financial planners, individual investors, aspiring money managers and institutional investors looking to understand the world of small cap investing and how to capture the significant opportunities therein. While the small cap advantage has long been known most literature on the subject has come from academic observers and self serving industry participants. Bares provides a welcome perspective from an independent money manager who has been providing impressive excess returns to his clients over the past ten years. In this age of so much corrupt corporate governance it is refreshing to see that there are those in the financial industry that do put the interest of their clients first and are achieving notable success in doing so. For those with the patience, skill and integrity to follow the precepts outlined in these pages there is wealth to be mined.

I loved this book and found it seemingly simple to apply. Our Catholic school is starting an endowment and we will be using the principles in this book as the foundation for future generations at our beloved school. It could not have arrived at a better time.

I currently represent a small-cap manager to the institutional community and will be sending them a copy of this book. It is a great read cover to cover. It dives into everything an aspiring manager or someone who hires them would want to know about the unique aspects of the small-cap space. The material strikes a balance of not being overly complex while at the same time providing interesting and insightful information about a variety of small-cap related topics. Highly recommended.

Mr. Bares has a gift for taking seemingly complex concepts and processes and making them easy for the most novice investor to read and understand. This is by far the best book I have ever read on small-cap investing and one of the most easy-to-understand, well-written investment books written in the last decade. In addition to taking the reader through the pros and cons of small-cap investing, Mr. Bares takes the reader through his own proven investment philosophies and processes and gives insight on how he set up his own successful investment firm from the organization, to fund-raising, to setting up fee structures and hiring a successful investment team.

This book is a must-read for any endowment fund members who want to gain an insiders perspective on how to more effectively evaluate investment managers, any fund manager (or prospective manager) who want to grow and learn from one of the best and any investor interested in learning more about the potential for higher than average returns through small-cap investing.