The Little Book of Alternative Investments: Reaping Rewards by Daring to be Different (Little Books. Big Profits) [Hardcover]

Ben Stein (Author), Phil DeMuth (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 29, 2011 | Series: Little Books. Big Profits (Book 31)

Praise For THE LITTLE BOOK OF ALTERNATIVE INVESTMENTS

"Ben and Phil have done it again. Another lucid, insightful book, designed to enhance your wealth! In today's stock-addled cult of equities, there is a gaping hole in most investors' portfolios...the whole panoply of alternative investments that can simultaneously help us cut our risk, better hedge our inflation risk, and boost our return. This Little Book is filled with big ideas on how to make these markets and strategies a treasured part of our investing toolkit."
—Robert Arnott, Chairman, Research Affiliates

"I have been reading Ben Stein for thirty-five years and Phil DeMuth since he joined up with Ben ten years ago. They do solid work, and this latest is no exception."
—Jim Rogers, author of A Gift to My Children

"If anyone can make hedge funds sexy, Stein and DeMuth can, and they've done it with style in this engaging, instructive, and tasteful how-to guide for investing in alternatives. But you should read this Kama Sutra of investment manuals not just for the thrills, but also to learn how to avoid the hazards of promiscuous and unprotected investing."
—Andrew Lo, Professor and Director, MIT Laboratory for Financial Engineering

Q&A with Co-Authors Ben Stein and Phil DeMuth

Co-Author Ben Stein

The book discusses the 60/40 portfolio – what are the good and bad sides of it?
The 60/40 stock/bond portfolio has evolved by natural selection to be the default preference for many investors. Since 1976 it has offered about 93 percent of the returns of the entire stock market with only about 65% of the risk. That's a pretty good trade-off. On the other hand, the vast majority of the risk comes from the stock side. It is basically riding the stock market with a shock-absorber from the bonds. This is the impetus to our search for alternatives -- the desire to spread our risks so we don't get jerked around as much.

Why do you say in the book “Luck is a terrible strategy” ?
If you scratch the surface, most investors are terrified. They know the pain of losing money, yet they have to do something with their savings, so they are led by the financial services industry to throw it at whatever has done well lately and then cross their fingers. Wall Street's basic strategy is to post impressive performance numbers by taking on added risks that are not visible until it is too late. This is what lures the suckers into the tent. It works most of the time, because most of the time the market is up. When it collapses, if investors move at all, it is simply to the next guy with a great recent track record. This is not a profitable way to invest.

Co-Author Phil DeMuth

Why are you against gold (i.e. If you are a king or pirate, you need a chest of gold. If not, you don’t)
Most assets are supported by underlying earning power. Gold is supported by other people's fascination with gold. This is a circular argument. Gold is extremely difficult to value rationally, which means that its price is wildly susceptible to fanaticism and gold metaphysics. By definition, most people will get most interested precisely when the price is highest and the expected future returns are lowest. That said, we do believe that a small allocation to a broad basket of commodities (including precious metals) can be a useful portfolio diversifier.

Why are hedge funds the ultimate alternative investment?
Hedge funds are the ultimate alternative investment because they set out to be. They set out to 'hedge" or bet against whatever is the prevailing wisdom or trend. Their whole purpose is to go against whatever the general market feeling is: so, if people are loading up on crude oil, they sell crude; if people are going long on real estate, they go short on real estate. If the market generally is optimistic, they short the market.

That is at least what hedge funds are supposed to be. Some are really just managed investment pools, but their goal is to be contrary.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"...a great little book for investors who are trying to improve their asset allocation. Lots of meat and fun to read."
--Brenda Jubin, Ph.D., Seeking Alpha

"Chock full of easy to digest information, useful advice, specific fund recommendations and it is a hoot and a holler to read. Not a dull page in it. And it will tell you just about everything you need to know about these essential alternative investment portfolio diversifiers." -- Consuelo Mack, WealthTrack

“The authors give an uncommonly clear account of the desirable alternatives, especially hedge funds. This is a great little book for investors who are trying to improve their asset allocation. Lots of meat and fun to read.”
—Seeking Alpha

From the Inside Flap

Are you underwhelmed with the way your traditional 60/40 portfolio has been performing lately and wondering why? Do you suspect there might be better ways to invest your money, but aren't sure what they are? What about all those "alternative" investments you keep hearing so much about in the media, such as commodities, real estate, emerging market funds, and, of course, that darling of pirates, Medieval monarchs, and radio talk-show hosts everywhere: gold? And how about the legion of new financial products Wall Street keeps spawning like kudzu—exotic creatures with strange-sounding names like "replicants," "100/30s," and "buy/write" funds? How do they work, and do any of them make sense for you?

The Little Book of Alternative Investments gives you complete, detailed answers to all those questions—and a whole lot more. Like a pair of trusty native guides, bestselling investment authors Ben Stein and Phil DeMuth clear a path through the alternative investments jungle. They identify the flora and fauna, stopping along the way to tell you which ones are safe to consume and which ones will consume you, if given half a chance. And they explain in plain English, not Wall Street Swahili, how each product or class of products works (or doesn't work), and how each can be used to help you reduce risk and boost returns.

Just as important, if not more so, Ben and Phil arm you with proven portfolio management strategies that take full advantage of the best of the best alternative products out there. No matter what your budget, level of experience, or tolerance for risk, you'll discover how to use everything from REITs and futures to hedge funds and hedge fund-like mutual funds to shield your money from the bubble-and-bust, hurly-burly of the markets and come out ahead, in all economic climates.

Making the technical simple, the arcane accessible, and the dry laugh-out-loud funny, The Little Book of Alternative Investments is your guide to taming the alternative investments jungle and cultivating an investment portfolio that consistently delivers better-than-market risk-adjusted performance.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Wiley; 1 edition (March 29, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0470920041
• ISBN-13: 978-0470920046
• Product Dimensions: 5.6 x 1 x 7.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #38,222 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 23 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars If you are interested in alternative investments, this is a great introduction and guide. April 27, 2011

By Craig Matteson HALL OF FAMETOP 500 REVIEWER

Format:Hardcover

Most of us want to be rich. We believe that the rich know some secret that the rest of us don't. Much like they believe that someone who plays the piano well has some kind of special gift that frees them from the thousands of hours of hard practice that we normal people have to put in to develop what skill we have. This despite research paper after doctoral thesis after peer reviewed article that demonstrates that they way to do well with investments is to put as much money as you can into a range of index funds in equities and bonds over a long period of time.

But we know there are traders who make untold millions engaging in activities and strategies more active than that. Can't we learn them and tap into that ocean of wealth? You know, can't we just dip our toe into the vast ocean of dollars flowing through the markets and get to easy street faster and get a better address?

This interesting, informative, and entertaining book by Ben Stein and Phil DeMuth gives you a tour of Alternative Investments. That is things to invest in and investment strategies other than the standard 60/40 stock fund / bond fund mix you have been used to. While they cover the basic strategies in the brief introduction, I encourage you to also purchase and read the authors' "The Little Book of Alternative Investments" The Little Book of Bulletproof Investing: Do's and Don'ts to Protect Your Financial Life (Little Books. Big Profits)to get a good grounding on sound investment strategy and why it is sound. Then come back to this book so you can step off the safe and well marked path and wander deeper into the investment casino. One of the great services the authors do for you is to make clear who you are sitting down at the table to bet against and why the odds are stacked against you. You know that old adage about sitting down at a poker table and not being able to see the sucker? Yeah, it's you here, too. That is, unless you don't try to take on the guy with a super computer and a Ph.D. from MIT directly, but to use new products that act much like hedge funds and can be purchased rather cheaply. And since they tend be broad based across market sectors you get some protection from the greater variability individual investment might have.

Their first chapter shows you what Alternative Investments are. They show you clearly why what you thought was diversification is just investing in market segments because you own stocks. Stocks in the broad market and stocks in overseas markets are still stocks. And when you get the kind of massive downturn we just went through they all tend to move in the same gut wrenching direction. They point out that holding cash is, in many ways, the ultimate alternative investment. In the second chapter they show you the importance of weighting your portfolio by risk rather than just in dollar allocation. Read this chapter closely.

One of the fads in alternative investing is "collectibles". The problem is that most of them available to you and me are just mass produced items and are not going to become valuable. I love the Stein's and DeMuth's descriptions of how the art markets really work and their noting that it most difficult to convert money into beauty and then back into money. So, if you get emotional pleasure from investing in collectibles and are happy with that as your return, then do it. But not with a view to getting rich anytime soon.

Chapter four gives you a tour of investment horrorshows that are designed to benefit a variety of people other than you. Just remember that all important question, "if this is such a great deal why are they selling it to me for my supposedly worthless dollars rather than keeping this great stuff for themselves? Chapter five gives you a tour of the realities and difficulties of the commodities markets. And chapter six gives you the royal tour of real estate and why REITs can be great for people who want to invest in real estate without having to do the work of collecting rents, unstopping toilets, and insuring the properties.

Chapter seven takes you into the realities and exposes the myths of hedge funds and why you and I can't expect to really play in those markets unless with have many tens of millions of dollars to play with. But chapter eight is a very nice primer on the benefits of hedging your portfolio. There are now funds of hedge funds you can invest in rather cheaply as a kind of hedge fund lite. The authors call chapter nine a field guide to hedge funds. They give you a tour of the strategies various kinds of funds take and what that can mean to you. Chapter ten deals with arbitrage and how the term has been debased. But certain funds are based on it and they have certain characteristics. Chapter eleven examines some funds the authors like but they are clear that these funds do not represent all good funds nor do they pretend that these funds are any kind of magic bullet. I especially like the way the authors urge you to spend 70 to 100 hours in your own study of the funds you consider. Sadly, too many people spend more time deciding on a refrigerator than they do in placing their life savings.

The funds the authors examine just illustrate the ideas the authors are laid in this book. I especially liked and urge you to pay close attention to the "roll your own" alternative hedge fun. They explain how they came to pick those stocks in a previous book and how they performed in the recent unpleasantness. Yes, it fell. But it turns out not as much as the market in general and other funds in particular. They also explain how they would rebuild the fund in today's market. All important and useful concepts to read and think about.

The last chapter takes you through a fund beauty pageant and shows you're their performance over time. This should help you get a feel for how funds might behave the real world. Sadly, it's not all ice cream sundaes and weight loss.

This is a terrific and interesting book that I think you should read before you dash into these fashionable investments and are beguiled by sweet talk and gauzy amply filled sweaters. This is your precious hard earned money that you have left after taxes and living expenses. Don't give it away. Stein and DeMuth want you to keep it, protect, and grow it responsibly.

Reviewed by Craig Matteson, Saline, Michigan

25 of 28 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars Could have been a lot better August 9, 2011

By Jason

Format:Hardcover

The Little book of alternative Investments is not for the little guy. The book contains some useful discussion, but largely it was a waste of money - Average investors get no help here. Yes, the "book" is about alternative investments, but an overwhelming part of discussion addresses hedge funds. Message to Ben and Phil: To invest in hedge funds, one has to be an accredited investor which means individual investor net worth, or joint net worth with the person's spouse, must exceed $1 million. As well, accredited investor income must be at minimum, $200,000 in each of the two most recent years, or joint income with a spouse must exceed $300,000, with a reasonable expectation the same income level will continue. To be fair, on page 113, the authors make a brief reference that "we don't want to forget about the little people." Here, the authors explain how investors who are not accredited can participate by purchasing a hedge fund "fund of funds", which is a mutual fund, and to their credit, they mention that those investing in such mutual funds will need to pay another layer of fees, on top of what the hedge funds managers' charge. I bought the book based on trust the authors would perform, but was disappointed. Had the book had an index, and if it were available, it would have been a heads-up, not to buy the book.

35 of 43 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars The solution is not either/or its both/and March 31, 2011

By Buba

Format:Hardcover

I have been reading Stein and DeMuth for many years and I have become personally convicted to their philosophy of investing, which continues to progress. I became convinced when I read some stuff by Harry Markowitz. Markowitz had been touted in one of their books. I had been investing for years with typical poor results and the AH-HA moment was to come to the realization that a portfolio need to be managed as a whole, not as a bunch of individual little piles of ideas. It's not own a house, and own some bonds, and own some IBM and GE or Contrafund and on and on, but to view all the "money" you have as a single unit of wealth and then ask the question how do I most efficiently manage this unit. Markowitz's bright idea was to develop an efficient frontier based on optimized risk vs reward for the entire portfolio. This included choosing investments that also managed diversity and cost, and controlling volatility by diversification. By optimizing each investment in the portfolio on a risk adjusted basis and it's correlation to the rest of the instruments in the portfolio the sum of the portfolio became more efficient than the risk reward of each of its parts SHAZAM! More bang for the buck!

The recommendation was then to ditch all the stock pickers and mad money grinners (salesmen one and all, more interested in feathering their nests than yours) for buy and hold passive investments and by proper diversification across the universe you could risk adjust your return. Next Quant was added to the mix. Monte Carlo engines that would run hundreds of scenarios on the instruments in the portfolio varying first this and that and then spreading out the most probable outcome and the standard deviation of other outcomes and listing them in order of likelihood. This technique allows you to "worse case scenario" your financial plan to some given percentage out into the future. The scenarios would not take into account things like getting hit by a meteor but they would give you some idea what would happen in the case of the 100 year flood, or living to 100. With that analysis you could figure some idea of how long the nest egg would last over a life time of retirement and how aggressively you could tap that egg. It also gave you a means to re-assess your plan so you would never run out of money, yet efficiently spend what you have invested, and enjoy the fruit of your good planning.

Using these tools you could come up with a simple investment plan based on passive funds that would make money when times are good and not loose as much money when times are bad. If you loose 50% you need to make 100% to get back to even. If you loose 25% you only need to make 33% to get whole. Over the years if you make market return with less than market risk and the cost of doing business is kept to a absolute minimum YOU WIN.

To increase diversity you add assets like bonds, commodities and REITS, which are considered alternative to stocks. They are especially diversifying because they hold low correlation to stocks. But again in the previous books these have been added as passive low cost funds or ETF's. It was either/or. Either you invested in Contrafund and paid the piper (Fidelity) the cost admission OR you bought the low cost Van Guard ETF VTI. With this book is introduced the notion of buying alternative funds that provide some access to hedge fund strategies. Hedge funds tend to try and balance themselves in a way to not be correlated to stocks, just what you need to increase the diversity and reduce the risk. In addition some of these funds use active market strategies such as being able to go short and long, or they may do different kinds of arbitrage and they may arbitrage in ways that are independent of whether the market as a whole is going up or down. These funds can set up these trades in a wide variety of instruments like credit spreads, currency spreads, or various derivative combinations and the money is made over a billion little trades making a penny here and a nickle there. They may include plays on momentum, and a whole variety of ways to make money that are not strictly based or even remotely based on how the Dow is doing. The whole portfolio performs better because the march upward is relentless and the occasional fall into the ditch is mitigated. The cost of these alternative instruments are a little more expensive, and the style is not passive. This is why I call this method BOTH/AND you use both passive cheap investments and a little more expensive active investments both combined using the quant method to realize a more efficient Markowitz frontier, aka over time more bang for the buck. Using Stein and DeMuth's methodology you can get on the elevator at what ever level you like. From simple do it yourself portfolios to joining forces with a investing professional who charges a set fee and does not make his money by selling you crap designed to line his pockets and not yours. This style of investing is not "easy" as in the sense of ordering from a Chinese menu (one from Column A, one from Column B and C and with 5 orders you get eggroll). It does require some active participation and some active understanding of what the hell you are doing. This book goes a long way to begin to instruct you on what the hell you are doing.

Over the past several years I have migrated my entire portfolio to this style, so my money is where my mouth is, and I am well pleased. The book is a fun read but there are some parts that can be a little hard slogging, BUT that is the point of learning. If it was all easy you would already know it and learning this stuff will make you smarter than any talking head on CNBC.