Review ? The Art of Execution

Professor Failure

What can we learn from failure? Aside from the fact that there?s an entire industry of business literature fetishizing the idea that it has much to teach us (as a kind of doppelgänger to the decades of success literature that took a person or business?s success as given and tried to look backward for an unmistakeable pattern that could?ve predicted it) I?m personally skeptical of what failure might teach. Life is complex and there is often little to separate the failure and the success but timing and luck in certain endeavors.

So, I approached Freeman-Shors book with some trepidation as the subtitle of the book suggests this is a study of failure. Au contraire, what we have here is actually a psychological or behavioral study, somewhat in the vein of Benjamin ?you are your own worst enemy in investing? Graham, which studies not failure per se, but rather how investors respond differently to failure and thereby either seal their fate or redeem themselves.

A Behavioral Typology

The book recounts the investment results of several different groups of portfolio managers who were categorized, ex post facto, into various groups based upon how they reacted to adverse market conditions for stocks they invested in. The Rabbits rode most of their failed investments down to near-zero before bailing out and taking the loss. The Assassins had a prescribed set of rules for terminating a losing position (either a % stop-loss, or a maximum time duration spent in the investment such as a year or a quarter). The Hunters kept powder dry and determined ahead of time to buy more shares on a pullback (ie, planned dollar-cost averaging).

While I am suspicious of backward-looking rule fitting, I do think the author?s logic makes sense. What it boils down to is having a plan ahead of time for how you?d react to failure. The Rabbits biggest mistake is they had none whatsoever, while the Assassins managed to protect themselves from total drawdowns but perhaps missed opportunities to profit on volatility rebounds. The author seems most impressed with the Hunters, who habitually started at a less than 100% commitment of funds to a planned position and then added to their investment at lower prices when the market gave them an opportunity to do so.

Freeman-Shor?s point is that when the price falls on your investment you need to decide that something material has changed in the story or facts and you sell, or else you need to be ready to buy more (because if it was a good buy at $10, it?s a great buy at $5, etc.) but you can not just hang tight. That isn?t an investment strategy. This is why I put this book in the Benjamin Graham fold, the message is all about being rational ahead of time about how you?d react to the volatility of the market which is for all intents and purposes a given of the investing landscape.

Learning From Success, Too

The author goes over a couple other behavioral typologies, Raiders and Connoisseurs. I won?t spoil the whole book, it suffices to say that this section is worth studying as well because it can be just as nerve-wracking to try to figure out whether to take some profit or let a winner ride when you have one. Freeman-Shor gives some more thoughts based on his empirical observations of other money managers who have worked for him on when it?s best to do one or the other.

More helpfully, he summarizes the book with a winner?s and loser?s checklist.

The Winner?s Checklist includes:

Best ideas only
Position size matters
Be greedy when winning
Materially adapt when losing
Only invest in liquid stocks
The last bit is probably most vital for a fund manager with redeemable capital.

The Loser?s Checklist includes:

Invest in lots of ideas
Invest a small amount in each idea
Take small profits
Stay in an investment idea and refuse to adapt when wrong
Do not consider liquidity
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It is hard for me to decide in my own mind if this book is a 3.5 or a 4 on a 5-point scale. I think of a 5 as a classic, to be read over and over again, gleaning something new each time. This would be a book like Security Analysis or The Intelligent Investor. A 4 is a good book with a lot of value and a high likelihood of being referenced in the future, but not something I expect to get a new appreciation for each and every time I read it. A 3 is a book that may have been enjoyable overall and provided some new ideas but was overall not as interesting or recommendable.

While I enjoyed this book and did gain some insight from it, and I think the editorial choices in the book were bold, it?s closer to a 3 in my mind than a 4 just in terms of the writing and the ideas. I?ve found a lot of the content in other venues and might?ve rated it higher on my epiphany scale if this was one of the first investment books I ever read.

But something that really blew me away is that the publisher, Harriman House, seems to have figured out that people who buy paper books definitely appreciate having an e-Book copy for various reasons and decided to include a copy for free download (DRM-free!!) in the jacket of the book. This is huge. I read my copy on a recent cross-country flight and was really agonizing about which books from my reading stack wouldn?t make the trip for carry-on space reasons and then realized I could take this one with me on my iPad and preserve the space for something else. That?s a big value so I am going with a 4 as a result.