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Safe Haven

Investing for Financial Storms

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About this listen

What is a safe haven?

What role should they play in an investment portfolio? Do we use them only to seek shelter until the passing of financial storms? Or are they something more? Contrary to everything we know from modern financial theory, can higher returns actually come as a result of lowering risk? In Safe Haven, hedge fund manager Mark Spitznagel - one of the top practitioners of safe haven investing and portfolio risk mitigation in the world - answers these questions and more. Investors who heed the message in this book will never look at risk mitigation the same way again.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2021 Mark Spitznagel (P)2021 Audible, Inc. Analysis & Strategy Investing & Trading Personal Finance Investing Stock
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I seldom review or rate books I read but this one is mind blowing on so many dimensions. You can read it easy without thinking to much about the math and the financial implications and learn several an important lesson for you investing. But you can also ready it twice and enjoy the math, probability and think deeply about financial implications. I’m a great believer in tail risk hedging and find it important that investors choose to buy them self an umbrella! I have always believed in Danish Mortgage bonds as my safe haven, together with Cash Deposits and Government bonds. To consider tail risk hedging with index options far out of the money was out of my imagination. Find and choose you own umbrella! And don’t take more risk than you should. I would rather be to conservative than to aggressive.

This is the best finance book ever!

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It is very clear in terms of listening. The content of the book is easy to follow and did not make claims of any winning strategy, this is the main thing I like about this book . Think risk first and make money later . Also don''t forget about tail hedging.

Easy to listen, good reminder of what risk is

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Felt a bit like reading an extended introduction to something that is very important. Unfortunately, after the introduction the listen ended abruptly.

Important concepts lacking meaningful examples

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The book makes nice points about the relationship between safe haven assets and cumulative returns. A key point is such assets may seem trivial on their own, but can wield significant effects on your portfolio, paying out big in catastrophe and preserving your wealth for compounding. He makes some nice points and shows some math (and intuition). This is nice!

Yet, the book is incredibly bloated and thin on practice. The key ideas in the book are fine, but the book’s goal isn’t to make them actionable, it’s to make them sound profound.

Thus, the book makes an okay point about portfolio construction and puffs them into a treatise on the universe. Fine, concrete ideas get wrapped *heavily* in waxing philosophical about Nietzsche or this or that—-like stressed metaphors on the perils of monocrop agriculture.

For most readers, book is thin on practicalities. The book builds to some backtests on gold and other presumed safe haven assets, and rejects some old wisdom on safe haven assets. But details on his main strategy are elusive.

In the end, there’s too much “eager freshman in philosophy class” relative to the content. You pay a lot to receive a couple nice nuggets of wisdom—without practicalities. You could cram the core ideas into a long blog post.

A few nice insights (not applications) sandwiched between grandiosity

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