The New Finance [Paperback]

The New Finance contains a comprehensive and organized collection of evidence and arguments that develop a persuasive case for an inefficient, complex and, at times, nearly chaotic stock market.

Search for the Grail; The Old Finance; How Long is the Short Run?; The Ancient Finance; The Past and the Future; The Race Between Value and Growth; Surprise or Risk Premium?; “Bearing” Risk in the Stock Market; The Holy Grail; The Real Determinants of Expected Stock Returns; Dangerous Conversation; Rational Finance, Behavioral Finance, and the New Finance; Final Words, 2008 Financial Crisis

MARKET: For readers interested in a unique perspective on making the case for the inefficient stock market.

This work makes the case for an inefficient stock market, where the complexity and uniqueness of investor interactions has important market pricing implications.

The efficient market's paradigm is at the unlikely extreme end of a spectrum of possible states. As such, the burden of proof falls on its advocates. It is their burden to deflect the stones and arrows flung at the paradigm by the nonbelievers. It is their burden to reveal the inaccuracies of those who present evidence contending that the paradigm doesn't square with the facts.

Moreover, the case of market efficiency has been made many times by others. In fairness to the growing number of advocates for the other side, I present here, and in the two other books of this trilogy, Beast on Wall Street: How Stock Volatility Devours Our Wealth and The Inefficient Stock Market: What Pays Off and Why, a comprehensive and organized collection of the evidence and the arguments that constitute a strong and persuasive case for a complex and, at times, nearly chaotic stock market that overreacts to most things—in particular, to past records of success and failure on the part of business firms. It is a market that prices with great imprecision, with signals coming from the prices of other stocks as its dominant driver.

In the course of this work, I shall make a case for the following assertions:

• Players in today's stock market persistently make a fundamental mistake—overreacting to records of success and failure on the part of business firms. This mistake was also made in the distant past, only to be rectified. Stock investors began making the mistake once again in the late 1950s, and they continue to make it today. Those who recognize the mistake can build stock portfolios, or find mutual funds, that will subsequently outperform the market averages.
• Owing to the foregoing mistake, the stocks that can be expected to produce the highest returns in the future are the safest stocks. Risky stocks can be expected to produce the lowest returns!
• Because of agency problems in the investment business, the opportunity that is there now is likely to remain there in the future.
• Models in financial economics aggregate from assumed preferences to conclusions about market pricing. Game-theoretic models consider interactions among market participants, but given the preferences, wealth, information, and other aspects explicitly considered, responses to identical stimuli are presumed to be identical. The New Finance argues that each interaction must be considered as entirely unique, making aggregation, in any way, from the preferences and behaviors of interacting individuals to meaningful conclusions about the structure and behavior of market prices a meaningless exercise. Thus, both rational and behavioral economics need to be reconsidered.