A life spent managing other people's money - and my own as well - leaves some scars, teaches some memorable lessons but most of all creates the foundations for a sound approach to successful long term investing. Many books have been written on the subject of managing money, ranging from the highly technical, and generally detached from the realities of the markets, to the irreducibly positive and usually hopelessly superficial. One can spot a gem or two in the rough but it is a rare endeavor. When my business partner and I sat down and discussed the idea that I would write a book about investments, we had one clear objective in mind: "Write something that will actually help investors. Not cold formulas, not stock picking ideas or technical set-ups but a replicable, portable, sound model about long term investing." I attempted to mix my multi-year experience as a portfolio manager and Professor of Finance to achieve just that: a manual about market structure as much as market driven emotions; in essence a blueprint for a financial entrepreneur. This book is about clarifying and demystifying how Wall Street works but also about how we, individual investors, act and react when thrown in the line of financial fire. If knowledge is power then a deeper understanding of what we want and what we become when we engage in the markets along with a clearer picture of what we are up against, will go a long way toward improving people's performance. Use this book; do not just read it. Make it your own, visualize it and test it. Sweat it out, take it apart and rebuild it again. In other words, make this manual a real experience.
About the Author: Davide Accomazzo is the Chief Investment Officer for THALASSA CAPITAL LLC, a Registered Investment Advisor and Family Office. He is also Adjunct Professor of Finance at the Graziadio School of Business and Management at Pepperdine University in Malibu, California. Mr. Accomazzo writes extensively on markets and portfolio management issues for different specialized publications and he is one of the contributors to the book Alternative Investment: Instruments, Performance, Benchmarks, and Strategies, part of the Robert W. Kolb Series in Finance. Mr. Accomazzo resides in sunny Topanga, California, with his daughter and wife.