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What is a safe haven?
What role should they play in an investment portfolio? Do we use them only to seek shelter until the passing of financial storms? Or are they something more? Contrary to everything we know from modern financial theory, can higher returns actually come as a result of lowering risk? In Safe Haven, hedge fund manager Mark Spitznagel--one of the top practitioners of safe haven investing and portfolio risk mitigation in the world--answers these questions and more. Investors who heed the message in this book will never look at risk mitigation the same way again.
List of contents
Foreword by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Part 1: What Comes First
Chapter 1: At War with Luck
Chapter 2: Nature's Admonition
Chapter 3: The Eternal Return
Part 2: What Comes After
Chapter 4: A Taxonomy
Chapter 5: Holism
Chapter 6: Bold Conjectures
Afterword: Amor Fati
Acknowledgments
Index
About the author
MARK SPITZNAGEL is the Founder and Chief Investment Officer of the hedge fund Universa Investments and the author of the book
The Dao of Capital.
Summary
What is a safe haven?
What role should they play in an investment portfolio? Do we use them only to seek shelter until the passing of financial storms? Or are they something more? Contrary to everything we know from modern financial theory, can higher returns actually come as a result of lowering risk? In Safe Haven, hedge fund manager Mark Spitznagel--one of the top practitioners of safe haven investing and portfolio risk mitigation in the world--answers these questions and more. Investors who heed the message in this book will never look at risk mitigation the same way again.
Report
"As introduced (and formulated) in Safe Haven, risk mitigation needs to be 'cost-effective' (i.e., it should raise your wealth), and to do that it needs to mitigate the risks that matter, not the risks that don't."
--From the foreword by NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB
"Clear, logical and persuasive, Safe Haven is highly recommended for all students of the markets--novice and professional. Spitznagel masterfully builds from first principles, establishing the role risk mitigation ought to play in investment portfolios and provides a simple yet practical framework to identify and analyze said Safe Havens."
--HARSHAL CHAUDHARI, Chief Investment Officer - General Electric Pensions
"Properly priced insurance against big investment losses can increase the expected compound growth rate of both insurer and insuree. It is a widely overlooked free lunch. Mark Spitznagel, a leading long-term practitioner, shares his insights from analyzing this extremely counterintuitive idea."
--EDWARD O. THORP, Author of Beat the Dealer and A Man for All Markets
"Safe Haven confronts the central challenge for an investor constructing a portfolio for the long term: how to mitigate systemic risk while enhancing the compound growth of the entire portfolio. Mark Spitznagel takes aim at the weaknesses of modern portfolio theory and offers a clear and compelling case for a better alternative framework."
--TED ELIOPOULOS, Vice Chairman, Morgan Stanley Investment Management, ex-CIO of CalPERS
"Spitznagel destroys all manner of conventional wisdom in this great read, including the widely accepted belief that risk-mitigation is the path to lower returns... Though Safe Haven is full of charts and numbers, it reads as though it's written by a poet. The world needs more people like Spitznagel, and more books like the one he's written."
--JOHN TAMNY, Editor, RealClearMarkets
"Drawing on logic, probability theory and history, Safe Haven aims to justify Spitznagel's investment theory and show that most perceived havens investors run to -- be they bonds, hedge funds or tail-risk funds -- do not work."
--LAURENCE FLETCHER, Financial Times
"Conventional wisdom in investing says there's a trade-off between risk and return. To make a lot of money, you must take the chance of big losses. Play it safe and you'll most likely have to settle for meager returns. [Spitznagel's] book says the strongest long-term returns come from reducing the risk in a portfolio... I think [he] is on to something that the rest of the industry should heed."
--PETER COY, The New York Times
"While sitting on a beach in Croatia reading about Bernoulli's principle and modern portfolio theory, I didn't think I'd also get a turn with Nietzsche, Aristotle and Plato. What's most relevant is the German philosopher's thinking around eternal returns, applied to the practice fo investing. That's the journey Mark Spitznagel brings you through in his 2021 book [Safe Haven], ever more timely now as markets whipsaw. Is there anywhere to run for cover?"
--SONALI BASAK, Bloomberg News
