Three decades of thinking, in print.

Think Like a Survivor, Invest Like a Strategist

On using market history as a working tool

Navigating today's markets takes more than software. It takes a sense of history — and mine was shaped by Black Monday, the dot-com collapse, the 2008 crisis, and the very different world investors face now.

I wrote this book to put those decades to work. Not as war stories told after the fact, but as a way of positioning a portfolio before the trouble arrives, and of telling the difference between a market that is expensive and a market that is breaking.

The Psychology of Staying Invested at the Wrong Time

How Cycles Are Made, Missed, and Survived

“Stay the course” is not bad advice. It was true, powerful and genuinely useful for one particular investor in one particular era — the long-horizon accumulator riding four decades of falling interest rates and expanding valuations.

That era ended. This book is about what happens when a slogan outlives the conditions that made it work, and about the retiree who has stopped adding money and started taking it out — facing a problem the slogan was never built to solve.

It opens with a client I call Ron. Sixty-three, a career engineer at a large Southeastern utility, three years from the retirement he had been planning since he was forty, holding a portfolio that assumed the last decade would be the next one.