The 90% Solution: Higher Returns, Less Risk

by David L. Rogers

The 90% Solution is about understanding the most important factors impacting today's stock market, how they influence performance--and how they can be used to produce higher returns. In it, author... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: B007YZSJ9I
• ISBN13: 9780471770817
• Release Date: October 2006
• Publisher: Wiley
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.97 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.3" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

An Excellent Analytic View of Today's Money Managers

David Rogers has made a cogent analysis of the state of the majority of mutual funds and their quest for mediocrity. If you're looking for someone to manage your money who doesn't accept the status quo, look no further. He is very honest,however, about the fact that their are others who look beyond mediocrity. His three year track record speaks for itself.

A secret not kept loses it's power.

If someone knows something that only a few people know and that information can help anyone to make money they would be crazy to give it away. The decemination of proprietary information about making money is big business and the result is that the more people who know about it the less likely it is to work. I wanted to know the secret but then I realized that I probably wouldn't have the courage to use it. In addition, unless you are really good at math it probably would be too hard to implement successfully. So if you want to make the kind of money that David Rogers claims to be able to make (which is certainly not unreasonable) you would have to become a client. But he doesn't claim that he is the only source for that type of strategy. The premise of the book is to convince people that he and others have found ways to exit the stock market when things look like maybe dark days are ahead and get back in when the sun begins to shine again. That alone would be an excellent way to raise your returns but if you are willing to take some extra risk you can profit from the negative direction of the markets as well. You can start by seeing if his market calls are correct by simply following the results of his money management that independent services display perodically.

Market Timing Will Soon Come Back into Vogue

90% Solution? Certainly, Dave Rogers is right that if we could somehow buy at the bottom after a major bear market and then sell out at the next top, there is a 90% chance we would make money, no matter what we buy. But his book goes way beyond this. For all the rote praise given by the "buy and hold" crowd to blindly holding "good quality" stocks tightly for the long-term, their performance is usually not even average. Most fail to match the gains of the averages. Even those slaves to the fashion of blindly holding for the long-term should understand that the very stocks that make up the major averages are not fixed for all time forward! Someone in a dark room, not in the public light, engages in "market timing" and assesses the individual components for continued timeliness. Every so often, they kick out the laggards and infuse new blood into the DJIA-30, the NASDAQ-100, the SP-500, the FTSE-100, etc. Even more right-on, Dave Rogers asks us simply to ponder whether the market must always be tilted up, much less at the same steep angle that it has been since 1982. In August 1982, the DJIA was at 800. Now in January 2007, it stands at 12,400. This is more than a 1500% gain in 24 years. A lot of things went very right for the market in this period. Communism was defeated. The Internet was invented. Taxation on the rich and stocks was halved and then halved again. But what if things change. What if retirees start to sell their stocks on balance as the population ages? Can the three trillion dollar cost of the US war on Iraq be really escaped, financially, diplomatically, morally? Peace is bullish for a while. The ending of the US war on Viet Nam in late 1974 led to a bull market, which ended in mid 1976. But, it then took six years for the market to cope with war's hang-over consequences and get back to its peak of 1020 in September 1976. We have only to look back at the period from 1966 to 1982 to see what an unsuccessful major US military adventure in Asia produced for the stock market, namely inflation, decline of the dollar, sharply higher interest rates, impeachment of a President, shrill partisianship and a DJIA that ended up in August 1982 more than 100 points, 10%, below what it was in January 1966, a full sixteen years earlier! Rogers asks us, ever so politely, just to think about how well we would take to a market that took on the bumpy characteristics of a roller-coaster. Would we really be comfortable riding out an 18-month to 24-month bear market like those from December 1968 to May 1970, January 1973 to December 1974, January 1981 to August 1982 or January 2001 to January 2003? Such bear markets very often wipe out 50%-90% of the value of popular growth stocks. He asks us if it wouldn't be worth while to start to learn how to spot the tell-tale signs that are the usual alerts to such long bear markets. Wouldn't it be worthwhile, in other words to learn some of the t

ACTUALLY THE 100% SOLUTION

I WAS DRAWN TO 'THE 90% SOLUTION: HIGHER RETURNS, LESS RISK' BY ITS AUDACIOUS TITLE AND GOLD STAR ENDORSERS ON THE BACK COVER--AND I WAS NOT DISAPPOINTED. THIS BOOK IS BOUND TO BE CONTROVERSIAL BECAUSE IT IS IRREVERENTLY CRITICAL OF THE FINANCIAL SERVICES INDUSTRY'S SATISFACTION WITH ACHIEVING ''AVERAGE'' RESULTS. IT EFFECTIVLEY CHALLENGES THE INDUSTRY'S ''BUY AND HOLD'' MAINSTAY, EVEN DOCUMENTING WHY THE CORNERSTONE OF THE INDUSTRY'S PURSUIT OF MEDIOCRITY MAY EVEN BE A FARCE. SUPERBLY WRITTEN, THE AUTHOR MAKES A COMPELLING CASE FOR OVERALL MARKET TIMING AS THE SUREST WAY TOWARD SUPERIOR INVESTMENT RESULTS. HE RECOUNTS HIS OWN PERSONAL JOURNEY DISCOVERING AND EMBRACING MARKET TIMING. HE DOESN'T GIVE AWAY HIS SECRET FORMULAS, BUT DOES GO INTO CONSIDERABLE DETAIL ABOUT HIS CONCEPTUAL APPROACH TO CONTRARIAN THINKING AS A PERSONAL PREFERENCE THAT HAS YIELDED SOME PRETTY HEADY RESULTS. HIS DISCUSSION OF CYCLES AND CONTRARIAN THINKING ALONE IS WORTH THE PRICE OF ADMISSION, BUT THE INSIGHTS THAT HE SHARES FROM HIS PERSONAL EXPERIENCES ALONG THE WAY ARE AN ENRICHMENT FEW AUTHORS PROVIDE.

eyes wide open

Fascinating insights into the cycles of the markets. Mr Rogers presents a compelling rebuttal to the "buy and hold" crowd. The premise of the book that 90% of a mutual fund / money manager's return is dictated by the market direction should be ignored by investors at their peril. He shows that there are actually long periods that being out and in cash is superior to holding the "market" when the "market" has decided that down is better than up. I wish he could have provided a little better insight to some of his methodologies, but I guess if he did they'd stop working. And finally the answer to that message about "if you missed the 40 best days in the market" propaganda we keep being fed. He demonstrates that thinking for yourself is always better than having someone do it for you. His independent reasoning has enabled him to achieve superior returns - a lesson we all can learn.