Friday, April 2, 2010

Review of No Bull: My Life In and Out of Markets by Michael Steinhardt

I wish I had read the Amazon.com one-star reviews of No Bull: My Life In and Out of Markets by Michael Steinhardt before I ordered this. With the exception of the famous passage on page 191 about variant perception, this book was totally lightweight.

The European bond "massacre" in 1994 caused a big drawdown for his fund, which he explains by saying, "Suddenly, events that were not ordinarily connected were." This happens constantly!

If you search the Google news archives over the past century for "debt crisis," you will see that there have been constant debt crises since the early 1980s. Only three years after the European massacre, there would be back-to-back Asian and Russian crises that would crush Long Term Capital Management.

Also, the book's tone was so self-congratulatory, like one of those ghostwritten business biographies. Some of his history is even embarrassing. He was an early backer of Bill Clinton. Etc.

I give it 2/5. It is easily the worst of the investing books I have reviewed recently.

5 comments:

Grace said...

Yeah, but Chapter 7 is terrific.

Grace said...

Yeah, but Chapter 7 is terrific.

CP said...

What? The chapter about how he met his wife?

PD said...

you should read "the big short" I read the vanity fair excerpt and that Dr. is pretty interesting.

CP said...

I'll have a Big Short review out next week.