Category Archives: Bücher

Book review “The Pay Off: How Changing the Way We Pay Changes Everything”

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I usually do favorable reviews of book because I don’t write about the bad ones. However this book is even exceptional among the many very good books I have written about.

There are some books that give you a new idea and/or explain something that I could never explain myself. This book created so many “Aha “moments for me that I am not sure if I have gained the same amount of new knowledge from any other book in the recent years.

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Summer Reading summary

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Over (spring and) summer, I managed to read a couple of books that might be interesting for my readers. This time a try a new format with a shorter summary on a couple of books compared to the more detailed single reviews I did in the past. I hope this is helpful nevertheless.

  1. The Rise of Carry

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“The Rise of Carry” is a more macro oriented book written by two former Hedge Fund “dudes”. Their thesis is that a significant part of today’s market activity is driven by “Carry Trades”, which are defined as leveraged bets with an asymetric return profile (“fat tails” on the downside). It is a very interesting approach to look at markets. The book was written well before Bill Hwang’s Archegos Capital collapsed due to …leveraged bets.

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Book review: “How Life imitates Chess” – Garry Kasparov

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By coincidence, I downloaded this book before I got interested in Play Magnus a few months ago. However this clearly motivated me to move the book to the front of the reading list…..

Garry Kasparow has been named as one of the greatest Chess players of all time and became Chess world chmapion in 1985 at the age of 22 and held the title over 15 years. After his chess carreer, he surprisingly went into politics. As a funny side note: Kasparov was involved in founding the first online chess company in 1999. In between he coached younger chess players, for instance Magnus Carlsen in 2009.

In this book, Kasparov tries to transport strategic lessons from Chess into fields like business, politics and investment. In between he also covers his greatest matches, hardest opponents (Karpov !!) and the lessons he learned both, from victories and defeats.

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Book Review: “Seven Mistakes Every Investor Makes (and how to avoid them)”

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Joachim Klement is a native German, London based investment professional who, among other things writes one of my favorite financial blogs named “KOI – Klement on Investing”.

Despite having a full time job and a high quality, frequent blog, he also managed to write a book. Being a German of course, he  doesn’t promise to make one rich quickly but it tries to identify and provide solutions for very common mistakes that indeed almost all investor make.

Although Klement is a more Macro oriented investor, his advice is great also for stock pickers or any other investment styles. He emphasizes a lot of points that I share 100%. The mistakes that he concentrates are:

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10 Years of Value & Opportunity – 10 Highlights, 10 LESSONS & 10 Books

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Again, time flies. Exactly 10 (!!) years ago on December 15th, 2010, I started this blog. 

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As every year a very special “Thank You” goes  to all readers, especially those who actively contribute either by comments or mails. I need to keep on mentioning that the interaction with readers is really driving the motivation to continue the blog in this format.

In this post I will reflect mostly on writing the blog, highlights and lessons over the last 10 years plus my 10 all time favorite book reviews. There will be a 10 Year investment/performance review in the beginning of January 2021. 

Some numbers: 

10 year stat        
Year Visits % Germany Posts Comments
2011 93,811 na 411 694
2012 178,485 49.82% 266 1,368
2013 325,240 43.14% 168 1,243
2014 430,794 32.26% 121 1,068
2015 459,992 25.94% 110 1,105
2016 521,197 28.52% 113 1,645
2017 635,741 28.79% 114 1,580
2018 452,267 28.57% 92 784
2019 325,169 31.56% 84 563
2020 YTD 483,824 39.03% 107 1,211
         
Total 3,906,520   1,586 11,261

All in all, I managed to post ~1600 posts over these 10 years which created close to 4 mn visits. The drop of visits (and comments)  in 2018 & 2019 was clearly the result of posting less due to a lack of time from my side.

So why I am still doing this ?

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Book Review: “Billion Dollar Loser – The Epic Rise and SPectacular Fall of Adam Neumann and WeWork”

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As my long term readers know, I love books about failed companies and WeWork is clearly one of the most spectacular failures in the recent times.

The book focuses initially mostly on the founder Adam Neumann, who grew up in Israel and didn’t achieve much there before going to the US. There he started a first business trying to sell baby clothing which was not too successful. He then met his co-founder Miguel McKelvey in the elevator of the building where both were working. Co-founder Miguel was intrigued by the fact that Neumann used to walk around barefoot and talked to everyone.

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Book review: “Lights Out: Pride, Delusion, and the Fall of General Electric”

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Lights GE

“Lights out” is a recently published book that covers the downfall of General Electric, which was in 2000 the world’s most valuable company with a market cap north of 500 bn USD and a proud history going back to Thomas Edison.

To the outside, the company led by “Neutron Jack” Welch looked unstoppable. With its famous management systems (Six Sigma and others) the company became a huge conglomerate, spanning business from their traditional light bulb and appliances business to turbines, financial, insurance and even TV and Movie studios. GE was most famous for continuous growth and an uninterrupted streak of quarterly profit increases until Jeffrey Immelt took over in 2001.

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Book review: “The Man who solved the Market” – Greg Zuckerman

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RenTech

This is another book that I have been waiting for to read for some time. Jim Simons is maybe not a household name in investing, but his Renaissance Technology fund (Rentech) has clearly on of the best track record of any investment vehicle in recorded history. However, other than some other famous investors, Rentech was (and still is) so secretive that hardly anyone had a clue how he/they did it.

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