100 Secret Strategies for Investing

By Richard Farleigh

Richard Farleigh reveals the 100 secret strategies that he developed to enable him to succeed in the markets.

During his time running a trading desk, Farleigh set out to develop a repeatable methodology based on observation and reasoning, not just on one-off flukes and luck, to enable him to outperform the market on a regular basis.

The (potentially controversial) beliefs that he incorporates into his strategies include:

– Markets tend to under-react, not overreact.
– Big, obvious ideas offer great opportunities.
– It is safe to invest with a consensus view.
– Contrarian trading is usually irrational.
– It is best to enter and exit the share market at the right times instead of always staying invested.
– Price trends are well known but under-utilised.
– Chartists are just astrologers.
– Investment and trading are increasingly similar.

Some of the techniques simply involve being better than other investors at some of the basics, including only chasing genuine opportunities, managing risks and coping with losses.

As his trading results started to attract some attention, Farleigh was frequently asked to give presentations of his ideas to other professional traders. From the feedback during these sessions he realised that others were interested in an approach to investing which was based on first principles. Finding that anecdotes were the best way to make a point, and that ideas could be summarised into numbered strategies, allowed him to show clearly how the methodology worked.

Years later, he is still using the same approach, and has found that amateurs, as well as professionals, are keen to find out how markets work and how to improve their investment performance. This book contains those secrets.

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About the 100 Strategies

The rules are based on two broad experiences. Firstly, my involvement with investing and trading has been an endless pursuit of looking for patterns and developing my own repeatable methodologies. I have wanted to turn an art into a science. Secondly, from so many conversations with intelligent and educated people, who are curious about markets, but have been unhappy with a lack of useful reading material.

The book is intended for anyone with an interest in trading or investing, whether they are amateurs or professionals. The laws grew out of a series of popular lectures that I gave in my early career and out of the process of training new people to trade the markets.

Perhaps a unique thing about my approach in this book is that I have developed a framework which is applicable to all markets, whether they are bonds, money market, commodities, currencies, stocks, or property. The more I have learnt about these markets the more I have been convinced that it is sensible to approach them the same way. This is very useful, especially when some markets are underperforming.

This is a serious book. It is definitely not a “how to get rich quick” trick. I have presented my observations and interpretations as laws for practical purposes. It incorporates equally a lot of groundwork analysis of markets.

In finance there has been a gap between practitioners and the theoreticians. I intend to bridge that gap with a solid and, at times, theoretical explanation for my observations. Nevertheless, I have presented the material in a personal way. It is light hearted, with lots of anecdotes. I have not done endless amounts of research on each of the laws, so at times I may have erred on the detail. However it is always the concepts that are important, as these are what I am trying to get across.

Richard Farleigh was born as one of eleven children in the country town of Kyabram in Australia in 1960. He was placed in foster care at an early age and grew up in Sydney.

Despite a difficult start in life, he went on to win a scholarship to study economics and econometrics at New South Wales University, and graduated with first class honours.

Farleigh worked briefly in the Research Department at Australia's central bank, the Reserve Bank of Australia, working on economic modelling.

At 23, he passed up the opportunity for an academic career in economics and joined a leading investment bank, Bankers Trust Australia. There he worked for a number of years in designing and managing swaps and other derivatives. During this period he demonstrated a strong ability at trading financial markets, and was then appointed head of the bank's proprietary trading desk, which achieved spectacular results by predicting big picture trends and by using a trading model he developed.

In 1992 he was hired as head of a very powerful private hedge fund in Bermuda, which had searched the world for the best candidates. He was able to retire at the age of 34, and moved to live in Monte Carlo. From there he began investing in small companies which were mostly situated in the UK.

Over the years, he has invested in over 50 start-ups, many of which have floated or been acquired. One such venture has been Home House, a Georgian mansion which Farleigh as a backer and Chairman, help to convert into one of London's most fashionable and successful private members' clubs. Despite his early retirement and being affected by the tech wreck in the year 2000, Farleigh has become substantially wealthy and he has been named as one of the top ten entrepreneurs in Europe.

Apart from being keen on tennis, skiing and boating, Richard is an internationally ranked chess player, and has represented Bermuda and Monaco in the Chess Olympics.

Richard was one of the Dragons in the BBC series of Dragons' Den, www.bbc.co.uk/dragonsden