You Can Be a Stock Market Genius: Uncover the Secret Hiding Places of Stock Market Profits

From Library Journal
The stock-market profits that investment pro Greenblatt is chasing are found in some areas not usually considered by the average investor: spin-offs, mergers, risk arbitrage, restructurings, rights offerings, bankruptcies, liquidations, and asset sales. Greenblatt acknowledges that pursuing them will require some time, effort, patience, and experience. But he argues that because these areas are not overstudied by the analysts, possible market inefficiencies can be exploited. He explains each area with case studies from his own experience. Librarians will love his answer to the question, "Where can you find these special investment opportunities?"?read, read, read?and he gives the best places to look, emphasizing that you can pirate good ideas but you still need to do your own homework. None of this should be beyond the experienced investor (Greenblatt himself says he doesn't "like to work too hard to understand an investment"), but it is probably beyond the neophyte.?Alexander Wenner, Indiana Univ. Lib., Bloomington
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
v Review
Alan C. "Ace" Greenburg Chairman of the Board, Bear Stearns Joel is my kind of guy -- very, very long on common sense. This book is great! -- Review

Review
The Wall Street Journal

Joel Greenblatt can indeed teach you about the market and how fortunes can be made there.



Andrew Tobias

bestselling author of The Only Investment Guide You'll Ever Need

I hope few investors will read this smart, sophisticated, fun book. I don't want competition profiting from its very real insights.



Alan C. "Ace" Greenburg

Chairman of the Board, Bear Stearns

Joel is my kind of guy -- very, very long on common sense. This book is great!



Review
Alan C. "Ace" Greenburg Chairman of the Board, Bear Stearns Joel is my kind of guy -- very, very long on common sense. This book is great!

Product Description
Fund manager Joel Greenblatt has been beating the Dow (with returns of 50 percent a year) for more than a decade. And now, in this highly accessible guide, he's going to show you how to do it, too. You're about to discover investment opportunities that portfolio managers, business-school professors, and top investment experts regularly miss -- uncharted areas where the individual investor has a huge advantage over the Wall Street wizards. Here is your personal treasure map to special situations in which big profits are possible, including:

* Spin-offs * Restructurings * Merger Securities

* Mergers * Rights Offerings * Recapitalizations

* Bankruptcies * Risk Arbitrage

This is a practical and easy-to-use investment reference, filled with case studies, important background information, and all the tools you'll need. All it takes is a little extra time and effort -- and you can be a stock market genius.



Simon & Schuster
Can a book teach you how to beat the pants off the stock market? After all, billion-dollar portfolio managers can't do it -- and if they can't, they figure no one can. Business-school professors not only say it's impossible, but they can cart out plenty of statistics to prove it. So, why should you buy this book? Because Joel Greenblatt has been beating the pants off the stock market (with returns of 50 percent a year) for more than ten years. And now he's willing to show you how to do it, too.

Here, in this witty and accessible guide, you'll learn the secret hiding places of stock market profits. You'll see how simple it is to succeed where the professionals and the professors have failed. No special tools are required. No degrees are needed. All it takes is a little time and a little effort, and You Can Be a Stock Market Genius.

But who's Joel Greenblatt and why should you listen to him? He's the former chairman of a Fortune 500 company and founder of Gotham Capital, an investment partnership whose stock portfolio achieved returns of $52 for each $1 invested at its inception. Now he's ready to reveal all his secrets.

This book will show you how to uncover the investment opportunities that the experts are actually trained to miss. You'll learn the hidden value and the incredible profits that lie waiting in those uncharted areas where the individual investor has a huge advantage over the Wall Street pros. This is not a book full of theoretical possibilities; You Can Be a Stock Market Genius is a practical guide to finding those special situations in which big profits are possible. It's all here, including specific case studies, the background information you need, and the tools you'll use. If you're an investor who wants to beat the market, you've come to the right place. If you want to be a stock market genius, just think of this book as your personal treasure map to the secret hiding places of the stock market profits that you've been looking for. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

About the Author
Joel Greenblatt is the founder of the New York-based Gotham Capital, a private investment partnership whose stock portfolio achieved returns of $52 for each $1 invested at its inception, and a former chairman of a Fortune 500 company with more than $1 billion in sales. Greenblatt holds a B.S. and an M.B.A. from the Wharton School. He lives on Long Island and works in Manhattan.



Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter 1

Follow the Yellow Brick Road --

Then Hang a Right

It doesn't make sense that a book can teach you how to make a fortune in the stock market. After all, what chance do you have for success when you're up against an army of billion-dollar portfolio managers or a horde of freshly trained MBAs? A contest between you, the proud owner of a $24 "how to" book, and these guys hardly seems fair.

The truth is, it isn't fair. The well-heeled Wall Street money managers and the hotshot MBA's don't have a chance against you and this book. No, you won't find any magic formula in chapter 8, and this isn't a sequel to How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, but if you're willing to invest a reasonable amount of time and effort, stock market profits, and even a fortune, await.

Okay: What's the catch? If it's so easy, why can't the MBAs and the pros beat your pants off? Clearly, they put in their share of time and effort, find while they may not all be rocket scientists, there aren't many village idiots among them either.

As strange as it may seem, there is no catch. The answer to this apparent paradox -- why you potentially have the power to beat the pants off the so-called market "experts" -- lies in a study of academic thinking, the inner workings of Wall Street, and the weekend habits of my in-laws.

We start with some good news about your education: simply put, if your goal is to beat the market, an MBA or a Ph.D. from a top business school will be of virtually no help. Well, it's good news, that is, if you haven't yet squandered tons of time and money at a business school in the single-minded quest for stock market success. In fact, the basic premise of most academic theory is this: It is not possible to beat the market consistently other than by luck.

This theory, usually referred to as the efficient-market or "random-walk" theory, suggests that thousands of investors and analysts take in all the publicly available information on a particular company, and through their decisions to buy and sell that company's stock establish the "correct" trading price. In effect, since stocks are more or less efficiently priced (and therefore, you can't consistently find bargain-priced stocks), it is not possible to outperform the market averages over long periods of time. Although exceptions (e.g., the January effect, small size effects and low price/earnings strategies) are covered briefly by the academics, most of these "market-beating" strategies are dismissed as trivial, transient, or difficult to achieve after factoring in taxes and transaction costs.

Since beating the market is out of the question, finance professors spend a lot of time teaching things like quadratic parametric programming -- which, loosely translates to how to pick diversified stock portfolios in three-dimensional space. In other words, if you muddle through complex mathematical formulas and throw in a little calculus and statistical theory along the way, you stand a pretty good chance of matching the performance of the popular market averages. Wow! While there are plenty of other bells and whistles, the message is clear: You can't beat the market, so don't even try. Thousands of MBA's and Ph.D.'s have paid good money for this lousy advice.

There are two reasons not to accept the basic teachings of the professors. First, there are some fundamental flaws in the assumptions and methodology used by the academics -- flaws we'll look at briefly later on, but which are not the central focus of this book. Second, and more important, even if the professors are generally correct and the market for stocks is more or less efficient, their studies and conclusions do not apply to you.

Obviously, most of Wall Street must also ignore the academics because the whole concept of getting paid for your investment advice, whether through commissions or investment advisory fees, doesn't square too well with the idea that the advice really isn't worth anything. Unfortunately for the professionals, the facts would seem to support the conclusions of the academics. If academic theory held true, you would expect the long-term record of pension and mutual-fund managers to equal the performance of the market averages reduced by the amount of the advisory fee. In a slight deviation from efficient-market theory, the professionals actually do approximately 1 percent worse per year than the relevant market averages, even before deducting their management fees. Does the theory that markets are "more or less" efficient explain this disappointing performance on the part of professionals, or are there other factors at work that lead to these lackluster results?

The Professional's Challenge

I spoke with a professional whom I consider one of the best in the business, a friend I'll call Bob (even though his real name is Rich). Bob is in charge of $12 billion of U.S. equity funds at a major investment firm. For some perspective, if you went to the racetrack and placed a bet with $100 bills, $12 billion would stack twenty World Trade Centers high (needless to say, a bet that would almost certainly kill the odds on your horse). According to Bob, the bottom line and the measure of his success is this: How does the return on his portfolio stack up against the return of the Standard & Poor's 500 average? In fact, Bob's record is phenomenal: over the past ten years his average annual return has exceeded the return of the S&P 500 by between 2 and 3 percent.

At first blush, the word "phenomenal" and an increased annual yield of 2 or 3 percent seem somewhat incongruous. Though it is true that after twenty years of compounding even 2 percent extra per year creates a 50 percent larger nest egg, this is not why Bob's returns are phenomenal. Bob's performance is impressive because in the world of billion-dollar portfolios, this level of excess return is incredibly hard to come by on a consistent basis. Some quick calculations help expose the limitations imposed on Bob by the sheer size of his portfolio. Imagine the dollar investment in each stock position when Bob sets out to divvy up $12 billion. To create a 50-stock portfolio, the average investment in each individual stock would have to be approximately $240 million; for 100 stocks, $120 million.

There are approximately 9,000 stocks listed on the New York Stock Exchange, the American Stock Exchange, and the NASDAQ over-the-counter market combined. Of this number, about 800 stocks have a market capitalization over $2.5 billion and approximately 1,500 have market values over $1 billion. If we assume Bob does not care to own more than 10 percent of any company's outstanding shares (for legal and liquidity reasons), it's likely that the minimum number of different stocks Bob will end up with in his portfolio will fall somewhere between 50 and 100. If he chooses to expand the universe from which he chooses potential purchase candidates to those companies with market capitalizations below $1 billion, perhaps to take advantage of some lesser followed and possibly undiscovered bargain stocks, his minimum number could easily expand to over 200 different stocks.

Intuitively, you would probably agree that there is an advantage to holding a diversified portfolio so that one or two unfortunate (read "bonehead") stock picks do not unduly impair your confidence and pocketbook. On the other hand, is the correct number of different stocks to own in a "properly" diversified portfolio 50, 100, or even 200?

It turns out that diversification addresses only a portion (and not the major portion) of the overall risk of investing in the stock market. Even if you took the precaution of owning 9,000 stocks, you would still be at risk for the up and down movement of the entire market. This risk, known as market risk, would not have been eliminated by your "perfect" diversification.

While simply buying more stocks can't help you avoid market risk, it can help you avoid another kind of risk -- "nonmarket risk." Nonmarket risk is the portion of a stock's risk that is not related to the stock market's overall movements. This type of risk can arise when a company's factory burns down or when a new product doesn't sell as well as expected. By not placing all your eggs in a buggy-whip, breast-implant, pet-rock, or huckapoo-sweater company, you can diversify away that portion of your risk that comes from the misfortunes of any individual company.

Statistics say that owning just two stocks eliminates 46 percent of the nonmarket risk of owning just one stock. This type of risk is supposedly reduced by 72 percent with a four-stock portfolio, by 81 percent with eight stocks, 93 percent with 16 stocks, 96 percent with 32 stocks, and 99 percent with 500 stocks. Without quibbling over the accuracy of these particular statistics, two things should be remembered:

1. After purchasing six or eight stocks in different industries, the benefit of adding even more stocks to your portfolio in an effort to decrease risk is small, and

2. Overall market risk will not be eliminated merely by adding more stocks to your portfolio.

From a practical standpoint, when Bob chooses his favorite stocks and is on pick number twenty, thirty, or eighty, he is pursuing a strategy imposed on him by the dollar size of his portfolio, legal issues, and fiduciary considerations, not because he feels his last picks are as good as his first or because he needs to own all those stocks for optimum portfolio diversification.

In short, poor Bob has to come up with scores of great stock ideas, choose from a limited universe of the most widely followed stocks, buy and sell large amounts of individual stocks without affecting their share prices, and perform in a fish bowl where his returns are judged quarterly and even monthly.

Luckily, you don't.

The Secret To Your Fortune

Since Bob clearly has his hands full, where can an investor turn for insight into making a fortune in the stock market? For better or worse, all roads appear to leave us at the doorstep of my in-laws. (Don't worry, I said mine -- not yours....