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Investment Secrets from PIMCO's Bill Gross
Praise For Investment Secrets From PIMCO's Bill Gross "No investor is held in higher regard by his peers than Bill Gross. His understanding of the markets and his insights on how to profit from them are unparalleled. Now, Tim Middleton takes you into Gross's world for an insider's view on how the world of finance really works. If this book were a bond, it would be AAA rated with a double-digit yield." -DON PHILLIPS, Managing Director, Morningstar, Inc. "The secret to investment success is discipline. In bonds, nobody has displayed better discipline than Bill Gross. And nobody has done a better job of explaining Gross's methods, and instructing private investors how they can exploit his approach, than Tim Middleton." -JON MARKMAN, Columnist, CNBC on MSN Money "Warren Buffett, John Neff, Bill Miller, Peter Lynch-the stock market has always had dominant personalities whose long-term success becomes legend. In the bond market, that dominant personality is Gross." -FORTUNE "Bill Gross is the Emeril Lagasse of bond managers." -FORBES "If you want to get a stock mutual fund manager steamed, ask why his fund can't beat bond guru Bill Gross." -USA TODAY
240 pages, Kindle Edition
First published March 5, 2004
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
February 25, 2022
Poorly researched and slightly misleading.
Highly disappointing, but maybe I should have checked out the facts a bit more before I picked it up. This is not a book by Bill Gross, not an interview with Bill Gross, in fact this is not even a book about Bill Gross! This is a book about bond investing, written by a financial columnist who has had a few opportunities to ask Gross a few very specific questions over the years. At the last page it even says as much - "I should stress that these are my own ideas...". All of what Gross has to say doesn't even cover 10 of the 200+ pages of this book. And it mostly focuses on his current (2003) view rather than his long-term philosophy, so it is mostly irrelevant today (2022) anyway. This should not be put into book format.
So this book is basically about the authors own advice for how to invest in bonds in some Gross-inspired way. Explanations are decent and I find most of the advice sound. Some more caution could have been given on mortgage bonds of course - with perfect hindsight, yielding 200 basis points over treasuries maybe shouldn't have been attractive enough after all.
I did gain some valuable insights here after all - mostly in the full chapter devoted to Gross' sources of inspiration: Jesse Livermore, Ed Thorpe and Bernard Baruch. Perhaps the credit here should go to the biographers from whom the author sourced these short stories.
But most of all, what makes me unable to appreciate this book is the plethora of factual errors.
-Trading bonds (as opposed to holding to maturity) is claimed to have been "a preposterous idea" in the 70's. This is a strange claim, since the whole idea behind inventing bonds is the ability to dispose of a loan before maturity. Popular books have for a long time analyzed bonds for active investment, such as The Intelligent Investor (1949). (p. vi)
-Misquoting the name of Inside the Yield Book: The Classic That Created the Science of Bond Analysis - arguably the most influential book on bonds of all time. (p. ix)
-Gross is claimed to not even be aware of the big impact he has, while in other sources he claims to always strived for fame. (p. 6)
-Mixing up alpha and beta returns. (p. 24)
-Mixing up diversification and hedging. (p. 51)
-Claims that Ed Thorpe was characterized by his "ability to grasp trends". Thorpe was about as close to a pure arbitrageur as you could be, far removed from trends, predictions and directional bets. (p. 89)
-Claims that prepayment risk "reflect a prediction of the future of real estate markets" rather than future changes in interest rates. (p. 100)
-Claims that McKay's famous book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds tells about "the Ponzi Scheme". The last edition of this book was published in 1869, while Charles Ponzi was only born 13 years later. (p. 184)
-Mixing up alpha and Sharpe ratio. (p. 190)
What else could I have missed? I can't really recommend this book to anyone since it might in worst case give you a less accurate picture of who Gross is.
Highly disappointing, but maybe I should have checked out the facts a bit more before I picked it up. This is not a book by Bill Gross, not an interview with Bill Gross, in fact this is not even a book about Bill Gross! This is a book about bond investing, written by a financial columnist who has had a few opportunities to ask Gross a few very specific questions over the years. At the last page it even says as much - "I should stress that these are my own ideas...". All of what Gross has to say doesn't even cover 10 of the 200+ pages of this book. And it mostly focuses on his current (2003) view rather than his long-term philosophy, so it is mostly irrelevant today (2022) anyway. This should not be put into book format.
So this book is basically about the authors own advice for how to invest in bonds in some Gross-inspired way. Explanations are decent and I find most of the advice sound. Some more caution could have been given on mortgage bonds of course - with perfect hindsight, yielding 200 basis points over treasuries maybe shouldn't have been attractive enough after all.
I did gain some valuable insights here after all - mostly in the full chapter devoted to Gross' sources of inspiration: Jesse Livermore, Ed Thorpe and Bernard Baruch. Perhaps the credit here should go to the biographers from whom the author sourced these short stories.
But most of all, what makes me unable to appreciate this book is the plethora of factual errors.
-Trading bonds (as opposed to holding to maturity) is claimed to have been "a preposterous idea" in the 70's. This is a strange claim, since the whole idea behind inventing bonds is the ability to dispose of a loan before maturity. Popular books have for a long time analyzed bonds for active investment, such as The Intelligent Investor (1949). (p. vi)
-Misquoting the name of Inside the Yield Book: The Classic That Created the Science of Bond Analysis - arguably the most influential book on bonds of all time. (p. ix)
-Gross is claimed to not even be aware of the big impact he has, while in other sources he claims to always strived for fame. (p. 6)
-Mixing up alpha and beta returns. (p. 24)
-Mixing up diversification and hedging. (p. 51)
-Claims that Ed Thorpe was characterized by his "ability to grasp trends". Thorpe was about as close to a pure arbitrageur as you could be, far removed from trends, predictions and directional bets. (p. 89)
-Claims that prepayment risk "reflect a prediction of the future of real estate markets" rather than future changes in interest rates. (p. 100)
-Claims that McKay's famous book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds tells about "the Ponzi Scheme". The last edition of this book was published in 1869, while Charles Ponzi was only born 13 years later. (p. 184)
-Mixing up alpha and Sharpe ratio. (p. 190)
What else could I have missed? I can't really recommend this book to anyone since it might in worst case give you a less accurate picture of who Gross is.
February 1, 2022
Waste of time
April 14, 2022
DON'T READ! WASTE OF TIME.
December 6, 2022
This book has some gems inside that make it worth way more than the shelf price.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews