 First edition | |
| Author | Dick Stoken |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Published | 2011 (McGraw Hill Professional) |
| ISBN | 9780071782296 |
Survival of the Fittest for Investors is a 2011 finance book by Dick Stoken about how the theories of Darwinism and survival of the fittest can be applied to an investor's portfolio. The full title of the book is Survival of the Fittest for Investors: Using Darwin's Laws of Evolution to Build a Winning Portfolio. [1]
Reception of Survival of the Fittest for Investors was generally positive. [1] [2] [3] [4]
The book was named as one of the "Year's Top Investment Books" and contender for "Best Investment Book of the Year" by the 2013Stock Traders Almanac. It stated that Survival of the Fittest for Investors "Shows how, with heightened insight and a powerful algorithm, you can survive and thrive in volatile markets by following the simple principles of evolution." [2] [3]
Leo Melamed, chairman of CME Group, stated that “Dick Stoken’s Survival of the Fittest for Investors is a masterful and unique dissection of what makes the market tick. It represents an indispensable and brand-new approach for the serious investor. A must on every investor’s reading list.” [3]
Seeking Alpha stated that "Survival of the Fittest for Investors is one of the “fittest,” best written investment books . . . The investor who is searching for a way to boost returns would do well to add it to his must-read list." [4]
Investment is the dedication of money to purchase of an asset to attain an increase in value over a period of time. Investment requires a sacrifice of some present asset, such as time, money, or effort.
An index fund is a mutual fund or exchange-traded fund (ETF) designed to follow certain preset rules so that the fund can track a specified basket of underlying investments. While index providers often emphasize that they are for-profit organizations, index providers have the ability to act as "reluctant regulators" when determining which companies are suitable for an index. Those rules may include tracking prominent indexes like the S&P 500 or the Dow Jones Industrial Average or implementation rules, such as tax-management, tracking error minimization, large block trading or patient/flexible trading strategies that allow for greater tracking error but lower market impact costs. Index funds may also have rules that screen for social and sustainable criteria.
A mutual fund is a professionally managed investment fund that pools money from many investors to purchase securities. The term is typically used in the United States, Canada, and India, while similar structures across the globe include the SICAV in Europe and open-ended investment company (OEIC) in the UK.
"Survival of the fittest" is a phrase that originated from Darwinian evolutionary theory as a way of describing the mechanism of natural selection. The biological concept of fitness is defined as reproductive success. In Darwinian terms, the phrase is best understood as "Survival of the form that will leave the most copies of itself in successive generations."
Dick Stoken is an American businessman and author.
Long/short equity is an investment strategy generally associated with hedge funds. It involves buying equities that are expected to increase in value and selling short equities that are expected to decrease in value. This is different from the risk reversal strategies where investors will simultaneously buy a call option and sell a put option to simulate being long in a stock.
Investment management is the professional asset management of various securities, including shareholdings, bonds, and other assets, such as real estate, to meet specified investment goals for the benefit of investors. Investors may be institutions, such as insurance companies, pension funds, corporations, charities, educational establishments, or private investors, either directly via investment contracts or, more commonly, via collective investment schemes like mutual funds, exchange-traded funds, or REITs.
Alpha is a measure of the active return on an investment, the performance of that investment compared with a suitable market index. An alpha of 1% means the investment's return on investment over a selected period of time was 1% better than the market during that same period; a negative alpha means the investment underperformed the market. Alpha, along with beta, is one of two key coefficients in the capital asset pricing model used in modern portfolio theory and is closely related to other important quantities such as standard deviation, R-squared and the Sharpe ratio.
In finance, an investment strategy is a set of rules, behaviors or procedures, designed to guide an investor's selection of an investment portfolio. Individuals have different profit objectives, and their individual skills make different tactics and strategies appropriate. Some choices involve a tradeoff between risk and return. Most investors fall somewhere in between, accepting some risk for the expectation of higher returns. Investors frequently pick investments to hedge themselves against inflation. During periods of high inflation investments such as shares tend to perform less well in real terms.
Algorithmic trading is a method of executing orders using automated pre-programmed trading instructions accounting for variables such as time, price, and volume. This type of trading attempts to leverage the speed and computational resources of computers relative to human traders. In the twenty-first century, algorithmic trading has been gaining traction with both retail and institutional traders. It is widely used by investment banks, pension funds, mutual funds, and hedge funds that may need to spread out the execution of a larger order or perform trades too fast for human traders to react to. A study in 2019 showed that around 92% of trading in the Forex market was performed by trading algorithms rather than humans.
Bridgewater Associates is an American investment management firm founded by Ray Dalio in 1975. The firm serves institutional clients including pension funds, endowments, foundations, foreign governments, and central banks.
A stock trader or equity trader or share trader, also called a stock investor, is a person or company involved in trading equity securities and attempting to profit from the purchase and sale of those securities. Stock traders may be an investor, agent, hedger, arbitrageur, speculator, or stockbroker. Such equity trading in large publicly traded companies may be through a stock exchange. Stock shares in smaller public companies may be bought and sold in over-the-counter (OTC) markets or in some instances in equity crowdfunding platforms.
In finance, a trading strategy is a fixed plan that is designed to achieve a profitable return by going long or short in markets. The main reasons that a properly researched trading strategy helps are its verifiability, quantifiability, consistency, and objectivity.
CAN SLIM refers to the acronym developed by the American stock research and education company Investor's Business Daily (IBD). IBD claims CANSLIM represents the seven characteristics that top-performing stocks often share before making their biggest price gains. It was developed in the 1950s by Investor's Business Daily founder William O'Neil. The method was named the top-performing investment strategy from 1998-2009 by the American Association of Individual Investors. In 2015, an exchange-traded fund (ETF) was launched focusing on the companies listed on the IBD 50, a computer generated list published by Investors Business Daily that highlights stocks based on the CAN SLIM investment criteria.
Seeking Alpha is a crowd-sourced content service for financial markets. Articles and research covers a broad range of stocks, asset classes, exchange-traded funds (ETFs), and investment strategies. Unlike other equity research platforms, insight is provided by contributors including a base of investors and industry experts rather than sell side. Seeking Alpha was founded in 2004 by former Wall Street analyst David Jackson.
A portfolio manager (PM) is a professional responsible for making investment decisions and carrying out investment activities on behalf of vested individuals or institutions. Clients invest their money into the PM's investment policy for future growth, such as a retirement fund, endowment fund, or education fund. PMs work with a team of analysts and researchers and are responsible for establishing an investment strategy, selecting appropriate investments, and allocating each investment properly towards an investment fund or asset management vehicle.
Jonathan Kinlay is a quantitative researcher and hedge fund manager. He is founder and CEO of Systematic Strategies, LLC, a systematic hedge fund that deploys high-frequency trading strategies using news-based algorithms.
Michael Dever is an American businessman, futures trader, entrepreneur, and author. Dever is the founder and CEO of Brandywine Asset Management, Inc., an investment management firm founded in 1982, and he is the author of the best-selling investment book "Jackass Investing: Don't do it. Profit from it."
Brandywine Asset Management, Inc. is an American investment management firm founded and managed by Michael Dever. The firm is registered as a commodity trading advisor.
Do-it-yourself (DIY) investing, self-directed investing or self-managed investing is an investment approach where the investor chooses to build and manage his or her own investment portfolio instead of hiring an agent, such as a stockbroker, investment adviser, private banker, or financial planner.