Product Description

Fund manager Joel Greenblatt has been beating the Dow (with returns of 50 percent a year) for more than a decade. And now, in this highly accessible guide, he's going to show you how to do it, too. You're about to discover investment opportunities that portfolio managers, business-school professors, and top investment experts regularly miss -- uncharted areas where the individual investor has a huge advantage over the Wall Street wizards. Here is your personal treasure map to special situations in which big profits are possible, including:

* Spin-offs * Restructurings * Merger Securities

* Mergers * Rights Offerings * Recapitalizations

* Bankruptcies * Risk Arbitrage

This is a practical and easy-to-use investment reference, filled with case studies, important background information, and all the tools you'll need. All it takes is a little extra time and effort -- and you can be a stock market genius.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #12107 in Books
• Published on: 1999-02-25
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 304 pages

From Library Journal
The stock-market profits that investment pro Greenblatt is chasing are found in some areas not usually considered by the average investor: spin-offs, mergers, risk arbitrage, restructurings, rights offerings, bankruptcies, liquidations, and asset sales. Greenblatt acknowledges that pursuing them will require some time, effort, patience, and experience. But he argues that because these areas are not overstudied by the analysts, possible market inefficiencies can be exploited. He explains each area with case studies from his own experience. Librarians will love his answer to the question, "Where can you find these special investment opportunities?"?read, read, read?and he gives the best places to look, emphasizing that you can pirate good ideas but you still need to do your own homework. None of this should be beyond the experienced investor (Greenblatt himself says he doesn't "like to work too hard to understand an investment"), but it is probably beyond the neophyte.?Alexander Wenner, Indiana Univ. Lib., Bloomington
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
The Wall Street JournalJoel Greenblatt can indeed teach you about the market and how fortunes can be made there.

Andrew Tobiasbestselling author of The Only Investment Guide You'll Ever NeedI hope few investors will read this smart, sophisticated, fun book. I don't want competition profiting from its very real insights.

Alan C. "Ace" GreenburgChairman of the Board, Bear StearnsJoel is my kind of guy -- very, very long on common sense. This book is great!

Ingram
An investment book that explains how to profit from mergers, bankruptcies, liquidations, spin-offs, and rights offerings.

Customer Reviews

Phenomenal
In a world filled with mutual fund managers who make millions for underperforming the S&P over the duration of their careers, students of investing should always ask to see a teacher's audited investment results before listening to a word.

Joel Greenblatt produced 50%+ annual returns over ten years. To put this superlative performance in context, it is better than Warren Buffet's. Quite simply: Greenblatt is an investing master and his teachings are worthy of special consideration.

The pleasure of this book is its simplicity. The kind of rigorous homework Greenblatt suggests is not easy to do in practice, but this is a key reason why it can be such fruitful work to do. Greenblatt's logic is driven by simple, fundamental and powerful truths: a) investing only in your best few ideas tends to lead to a higher quality portfolio, b) doing work where others are not contributes to an investment edge and c) there is statistical evidence to show that value investing and special situations outperform the broader market over time.

The book is filled with humor, common sense and a lot of investing wisdom. Greenblatt has opened the door, students must walk through it themselves...

Practical Advice for Sophisticated Special Situations Investing
This book is for those who cannot resist the idea of wanting to outperform the market averages. For most people, that's dumb idea . . . and indexed mutual funds would be a better choice.

But if you are willing to roll up your sleeves, put on your green eyeshade and look at things differently, Mr. Greenblatt's approach is a very valid one.

If you read only one of Mr. Greenblatt's books about investing (the other one is The Little Book That Beats the Market), read this one. You'll make more money with this one.

You can be a Stock Market Genius has the simplest explanation for special situations investing involving unusual securities that I have seen for the lay person.

For most people, this book will be a lot to chew on. I suggest that you start by simply trying to understand and apply one idea in the book . . . such as finding under priced small spin-off stocks. After you get the handle on that one, go on to another approach that interests you.

I have worked for over three decades helping companies design these new securities that fascinate Mr. Greenblatt so much. From that experience, I'm constantly amazed at how stupidly most corporate finance departments and investment banks pursue these new structures. I suspect that the answer is that the heavy brainpower is saved for more profitable work like M&A.

As a result, you will almost always find a great investment opportunity if you look at unusual securities. I encourage you to begin by spending a half hour getting the background on any unusual transaction you read about.

You can also improve on this book by doing more precise measurements of securities values (if you have the background to do that), but for many severely undervalued securities Mr. Greenblatt's approach of taking guesses about what a reasonable value is will work just fine.

Although the examples are older, these kinds of opportunities still abound in most categories he discusses (stub stocks are the exception). Mr. Greenblatt has a real talent for putting his cases together to make them easier to understand.

Have a ball!

Outperformance
This is the best book published on value / special situation investing. Greenblatt's investing rules should be committed to memory by every serious investor. The case studies are fantastic. This is a must read for anyone looking to outperform the market.