Modern Portfolio Theory has failed investors. A change in direction is long overdue.
We are in a time of enormous risk. Economic growth is anemic, and political risk to the capital markets is on the rise. In the U.S., a generation of white collar baby-boomers is heading into retirement with insufficient assets in their 401(k) programs, and industrial workers are stuck with materially underfunded pension plans.
Against that backdrop, the investing industry's current set of practices and assumptions-Modern Portfolio Theory (MPT)-is based on a half-century old formula that is supposed to deliver the maximum amount of return for a given amount of risk. The trouble is that it doesn't work very well.
In Getting Back to Business, dividend-investing guru Daniel Peris proposes a radical new approach-radical in that it does away with MPT in favor of a more intuitive, common-sense approach practiced by business people in their own affairs everyday: cash returns on cash investments.
"In a profession utterly lacking a historical sensibility," Peris writes. "One periodically needs to ask why we do things the way we do, how we got here, and whether perhaps there is a better way." Balancing detailed historical evidence with a practitioner's real-world expertise, Peris asks the right questions-and provides a solution that makes sense in today's challenging investing landscape.
List of contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Need for Rules
Chapter 1: What Chaos Looks Like
Chapter 2: The Founding Fathers Come Together
Chapter 3: The March of Progress -- The Emergence of MPT
Chapter 4: The (Nonexistent) Paradigm That Fails Investors Every Day
Chapter 5: Getting Back to Business
Conclusion
Notes
Suggested Further Reading
Index
About the author
Daniel Peris, Ph.D., CFA, is Senior Vice President and Senior Portfolio Manager at Federated Investors, Inc., in Pittsburgh. Before transitioning into asset management, Peris was a historian focused on modern Russian history. In that capacity, Peris was a Fulbright-Hays scholar in the former Soviet Union in 1991-1992 and held a post-doctoral fellowship at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University in 1995. He is the author of two prior books on investing as well as a study of early Soviet history.
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