Trillions
How a Band of Wall Street Renegades Invented the Index Fund and Changed Finance Forever
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Trillions
Buy Now for £12.99
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Narrated by:
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Christopher Grove
About this listen
Brought to you by Penguin.
'Grab some popcorn and take a front row seat, because Robin Wigglesworth has an astonishing story to tell you'
Tim Harford, author of How to Make the World Add Up
'A terrific read'
Gregory Zuckerman, author of The Man Who Solved the Market
'A fascinating journey and a crucial book'
Bradley Hope, author of Billion Dollar Whale
Fifty years ago, an unlikely group quietly assembled in the financial industry's backwaters, unified by the heretical idea that even the world's best investors couldn't beat the market in the long run. Including economist wunderkind Gene Fama, industry executive Jack Bogle, computer-obsessive John McQuown and former Second World War submariner Nate Most, the group succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.
Passive investing now likely accounts for over $26 trillion, equal to the entire gross domestic product of the US, and today is a force reshaping markets, finance and even capitalism itself.
Yet even some fans of index funds and ETFs are growing perturbed that their swelling heft is destabilizing markets, wrecking the investment industry and leading to an unwelcome concentration of power in fewer and fewer hands.
In Trillions, Financial Times journalist Robin Wigglesworth unveils the vivid secret history of index funds, bringing to life the colourful characters behind their birth, growth and evolution into a world-conquering phenomenon. It is the untold story behind one of the most pressing financial uncertainties of our time.
'An easy-to-understand and fun read, full of lively characters and little-known details of how finance really works today' Gillian Tett, US editor-at-large at the Financial Times and author of Anthro-Vision
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Critic reviews
Very few writers can tell a great story and help us understand a big idea. Robin Wigglesworth is one of those rare journalists who can. His history of the index fund is required reading for anyone who wants to know where the financial markets have come, and where they are going. It's also just a wonderfully engaging romp through the last half century of market news
Doesn't get interesting until the end
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Robin looks right back to where the ideas came from with a look at French mathematician Louis Bachelier (It was his PhD thesis), The Theory of Speculation, published in 1900, which essentially explained why markets are hard to beat.
What I found most interesting and clearly evidenced, was that professional active money managers could not outperform the markets year on year. This gave rise to the index fund and passive investing and has been growing rapidly since John Bogle first brought them to market in 1975 with his Vanguard Funds.
The conclusion is very interesting and a real side-step from the capitalist grandeur, which some indexes have become. Highlighting Antitrust, Ethics and conflict of interest. But dead are the days of have a hunch, buy a bunch, go for lunch.
Amazing Book
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As someone with a preference for the former rather than the latter, I found the middle heavy going. But that's just my preference, and the author writes clearly, entertainmently and knowledgeably through out.
Heavy on the human stories
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A riveting finance book
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Very good book
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