Missing Billionaires (eBook)

Victor Haghani has 40 years' experience working and innovating in the financial markets, and has been a prolific contributor to academic and practitioner finance literature. He founded Elm Wealth in 2011 to help clients, including his own family, manage and preserve their wealth with a thoughtful, research-based, and cost-effective approach that covers not just investment management but also broader decisions about wealth and finances. Victor started his career at Salomon Brothers in 1984, where he became a Managing Director in the bond-arbitrage group, and in 1993 he was a co-founding partner of Long-Term Capital Management. He lives in London and Jackson Hole, Wyoming. James White has spent two decades working in finance, covering the gamut of quantitative research, market-making, investing, and wealth management. He is currently the CEO of Elm Wealth, and previously has held research, trading, and executive roles at PAC Partners, Citadel, and Bank of America. He lives in Philadelphia.

Foreword xiii

Preface xvii

About the Authors xxi

Acknowledgments xxiii

Chapter 1: Introduction: The Puzzle of the Missing Billionaires 1

Section I: Investment Sizing 13

Chapter 2: Befuddled Betting on a Biased Coin 15

Chapter 3: Size Matters When It's for Real 27

Chapter 4: A Taste of the Merton Share 41

Chapter 5: How Much to Invest in the Stock Market? 49

Chapter 6: The Mechanics of Choice 67

Chapter 7: Criticisms of Expected Utility Decision- making 103

Chapter 8: Reminiscences of a Hedge Fund Operator 117

Section II: Lifetime Spending and Investing 127

Chapter 9: Spending and Investing in Retirement 129

Chapter 10: Spending Like You'll Live Forever 149

Chapter 11: Spending Like You Won't Live Forever 165

Section III: Where the Rubber Meets the Road 173

Chapter 12: Measuring the Fabric of Felicity 175

Chapter 13: Human Capital 193

Chapter 14: Into the Weeds: Characteristics of Major Asset Classes 201

Chapter 15: No Place to Hide: Investing in a World with No Safe Asset 235

Chapter 16: What About Options? 245

Chapter 17: Tax Matters 265

Chapter 18: Risk Versus Uncertainty 275

Section IV: Puzzles 285

Chapter 19: How Can a Great Lottery Be a Bad Bet? 287

Chapter 20: The Equity Risk Premium Puzzle 291

Chapter 21: The Perpetuity Paradox and Negative Interest Rates 297

Chapter 22: When Less Is More 303

Chapter 23: The Costanza Trade 309

Chapter 24: Conclusion: U and Your Wealth 319

Bonus Chapter: Liar's Poker and Learning to Bet Smart 327

Cheat Sheet 335

A Few Rules of Thumb 340

Endnotes 343

Suggested Reading 357

References 359

Index 373

"...a smart and sophisticated primer on quantitative risk-management techniques."
--The Wall Street Journal

"A compelling book dealing with an important and neglected question in finance: not what to buy or sell, but how much. Even sophisticated professionals tend to answer this question badly, leading to lost fortunes. But financial theory provides the answer. Mathematical but not excessively so, this will appeal to anyone with an interest in markets."
--The Economist Best Books of 2023, December 9-15, 2023

"The most important investment decision is not 'what' but 'how much.' If you ever hear a professional investor talk about a trade that taught them a lot, prick up your ears. Usually, this is code for 'a time I lost an absolutely colossal amount of money,' and you are in for one of the better stories about how finance works at the coalface. On this front, Victor Haghani is a man to whom it is worth listening. Now, along with his present-day colleague James White, he has written a book that aims to spare other investors his mistakes . . . The Missing Billionaires . . . examines what its authors argue is a much more important--and neglected--question than picking the right investments to buy or sell: not 'what' but 'how much.'"
--The Economist Buttonwood column "Size Matters," September 21, 2023

"This is a marvelous book that importantly extends the literature on financial decision-making. The authors creatively weave together the essence of practical considerations with insightful academic theory. One of a small handful of books that is timeless and should be read and reread over a lifetime for enjoyment and substance."
--Gary P. Brinson, CFA, Author, and Founder of Brinson Partners

"The missing billionaires in the book's title allude to the difficulty of keeping already-made fortunes. Believing that nobody should get rich twice, Victor and James arm investors with lessons galore, drawn from their long practitioner careers. Yet the core lessons come from academia, and this wonderful book gives the best shot for Expected Utility and lifecycle models to finally become widely used in real-world investment decision-making. Uniquely, this book puts position sizing in the center, showing through many illustrations how 'too much of a good thing' can be just too much."
--Antti Ilmanen, Principal at AQR Capital, Author of Expected Returns

"The Missing Billionaires addresses a topic that gets far too little attention in the investment community: how much to invest. The book is a terrific blend of theory, practice, and stories from the front lines. This is must-reading for anyone seeking to invest and spend wisely."
--Michael Mauboussin, Author and Head of Consilient Research, Morgan Stanley

"I enjoyed and learned from Victor and James' book on incorporating uncertainty directly into making better financial decisions. Rightly so, for them, risk is front and center. This book is a great education for all of us, seamlessly marrying sophisticated theory with applications, demonstrating the beauty of a risk architecture that combines specificity with illuminating implementations into the lifetime wealth management problem."
--Myron S. Scholes, Frank E. Buck Professor of Finance, Emeritus, Stanford Graduate School of Business, Nobel Laureate in Economic Sciences