One line plot of the book is – “ How side bets accumulate and go on to become a BIG bet ?” If you have read any of John Grisham books , you will be aware that he has the gift to turn any boring law suit in to a thriller ride for you. Michael Lewis weaves one such story of the financial markets, where the protagonists , unlike fiction books, are very much real life characters, who go on make tons of money in the subprime crisis.

The title of the book is completely misleading. It has no specific strategies mentioned at all. This book in that sense has a completely bogus title probably meant to deceive people. It merely lists the advantages of owning an ETF over an index fund / active managed fund. It then goes on to list a variety of ETFs and traces their evolution in a few sentences. You can get this knowledge by merely looking up on the web for a few minutes about the various ETFs that are available for an investor.

Trading Markets have been swamped by a variety of financial assets and subsequently, investment world has witnessed an exponential rise in the number of funds managing these diverse assets. Gone are the days when the investor had to allocate capital between just two segments, bond funds and equity funds. In the current scenario, the options have exploded. The number of Gold funds, sector specific funds, emerging market funds, country specific funds etc have been growing rapidly but the returns across all these investment vehicles have been completely random.

If it’s important, do it every day; if it’s not important, don’t do it at all. – Dan Gable

Regressing I(d) processes is fraught with danger of mis-specification and nonsense estimates. We often see analyst reports where a stock is being regressed with a composite index to find the beta of the stock OR two stocks are regressed to find the relative beta etc . If one looks at those numbers closely from a stats perspective, most of the estimates are complete non sense. Most often , knowingly or unknowingly , one tends to apply regression amongst non stationary series and then tries to use the estimate as though the regression has been done on stationary series.