"The Ivy Portfolio" - the book so good I bought it twice

“The Ivy Portfolio” – the book so good I bought it twice

First of all, this book actually has three different ideas for making money in the markets. It describes how you can diversify by asset classes, it describes how to deploy a timing model, and it describes in detail how you can find out what the top fund managers are buying so you can buy it too.

Mebane Faber, the book’s author, describes different models, some with as few as 5 major asset classes, some breaking those down into as many as 20 sector classes. He gives you the ETF for each of the classes, and gives data point after data point to describe how the models have performed in back-tests.

If you are curious about his work but don’t want to spring for the book and your library doesn’t have it yet, Faber’s ideas are available in a white paper called “A Quantitative Approach to Tactical Asset Allocation” which can be downloaded at

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.c...ract_id=962461

which is where I first read Faber’s ideas. The white paper is a bit pedantic. However, I found the book to be well-written and his ideas to be fleshed out well and easily grasped. The book starts a little slowly, but I think it is because Faber is meticulous about building the foundation of the ideas he presents. He fills the book with information to back up his assertions.


And that brings up a postscript to this book review. If you have a Kindle (which I do, and love it) do NOT buy the Kindle edition of this book. The book is filled with excellent charts and graphs and I couldn’t read any of them until I bought my second copy, a hardbound. A Kindle is a totally awesome electronic medium for reading, but not for reference books or technical books like The Ivy Portfolio. If you purchase this one, get a hard copy.