Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Preface -- Introduction: Excuse Me, Is This the "Real" World? -- PART I HOW MUCH YOU PAY -- 1 The Beardstown Ladies versus the Professionals -- The Big Investment Lie -- 2 The Extraordinarily High Cost of Investment Advice -- The Amazing History of Brokerage Fees -- "I've Never Been Able to Get More Than 3,000 from That Account" -- 3 The Outer Limits: Hedge Fund Fees -- Let's Do the Math -- The Highest-Paid Business in the World -- 4 Taxes Down the Drain -- Getting to the Meat -- The Dereliction of Duty of Money Managers -- Tax Avoidance Strategy in Investing -- The Bottom Line: Tallying Up the Costs -- 5 Why Do We Give Golden Crumbs to Rich People? -- Behavioral Economics -- How to Get Rich -- Golden Crumbs -- PART II HOW LITTLE YOU GET -- 6 Why Investment Professionals Can't Predict Markets -- Active and Passive Management -- The Myth of Centralized Information -- Endless Variations -- Theories Explaining the Unpredictability of Market Performance -- 7 The Abject Failure of Professional Advisors and Managers -- The Unpredictability of Market-Beating Performance -- The Academic Research Record -- 8 The Market Can Turn on a Dime -- Market Price Movements Fit These Models -- The Random Walk Model -- There Are No Trends -- Let's Change Our Verb Tenses When Speaking of Investment Markets -- The Market Always Turns on a Dime -- At Long Last Itô Comes into His Own -- Many Processes Are Approximately Random, but None Is Perfectly Random -- The Inevitable Small Depar tures from Randomness -- But Is It Worth the Cost? -- 9 The Claims of Money Managers: "Smoking Our Brand Prevents Cancer" -- How to Prevent Cancer, Fumarian Style -- The Booming Big Bertha Industry -- The Fumarian Data-Mining Miracle -- The Vast Tobacco-Consulting Complex -- We're Not in Fumaria Anymore.

The Investment Industry's Entourage Sprawls Like Fumarian Tobacco -- 10 Idle, Greedy Hands and Too Much Data Do the Devil's Work -- The Saga of Seagull Unlimited -- The Story of Ralph -- What They're All Doing -- How the Real Professionals Would Do It -- The Very Fumarian Moral of the Story -- 11 The Simple Rules of Nobel Prize Winners -- Markowitz's Theory: Don't Put All Your Eggs in One Basket -- 12 There's No Such Thing as a Free Lunch -- The More You Leverage, the Riskier It Is -- Sharpe's Insight -- The Greeks -- So Here's What You Should Do -- 13 Investment Genius or the Thousandth Coin? -- The Thumbnail Histories of Peter Lynch and Warren Buffett -- Was It Predictable? -- The Statistical Analysis -- Anyone Could Do It -- PART III HOW YOU ARE SOLD -- 14 Effective Pitches to Sell the Big Lie -- Now I'm the Manager -- The Sales Business of Investment Services -- The Asset Allocation Scam -- 15 How Investors Delude Themselves -- Tweaking the Neuron at a Conference -- Stimulating the Neuron and Starving to Death -- The Donahue Story -- The Original Ponzi Scheme -- 16 How Hedge Funds Operate and Are Sold -- The Investment Reserved for "Sophisticated" Investors -- A Typical Hedge Fund Story: Long-Term Capital Management -- It's the Story of Every Hedge Fund -- Why People Buy into Them -- 17 How Consultants and Money Managers Sell to Institutional Investors -- Picking a Money Manager -- Principal-Agent Theory Applied to Institutional Investors -- A Lavish Hedge Fund Conference -- 18 Derivatives: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly -- Using Derivatives to Hedge against Currency Exchange Risk -- TIGRs and CATs, Oh, My! -- Hedging with Options against a Fall in the Stock Market -- Are Derivatives Dangerous? -- The Black-Scholes Formula -- The Many Pitfalls between Sales Reality and Real-World Reality -- 19 The Modern Slippery Slope of Business Ethics.

The Path of Deception -- The Faithlessness of the Modern Business Environment toward the Customer -- To Sum Up -- Conclusion: The Ten New Commandments for Smart Investing -- The Basic Premise: You're Building Wealth, Not Gambling -- How to Avoid Wasting Enormous Amounts of Money Gambling -- How to Build Wealth through Investing without Gambling -- Notes -- Glossary -- Bibliography -- Index -- About the Author -- About Berrett-Koehler Publishers -- BE CONNECTED.