About this item
The investment advice and management industry is built on fraud: the idea that professional advisors can predictably and consistently help you get a better rate of return on your investments. The industry sells us on this lie using manipulative tactics that are studied, refined, Wall Street minted, and Madison Avenue packaged. And extraordinarily effective. Here, Michael Edesess exposes the shocking truth that, in fact, behind the success of nearly every prosperous investment professional lies not the ability to procure higher rates of return on investment for his or her clients but the ability to procure astoundingly high fees from those clients and nothing more.Through fascinating and sometimes humorous anecdotes and straightforward explanations of investment theory and scientific evidence, Edesess reveals just how badly investors are being scammed by The Big Investment Lie.
About the Author
MICHAEL EDESESS is an accomplished mathematician and economist with experience in the investment, energy, environment, and sustainable development fields. He recently authored a book about the investment services industry titled The Big Investment Lie, published by Berrett-Koehler. He was a founding partner in 1994 and chief economist of the Lockwood Financial Group until its sale to The Bank of New York in September 2002. Previously an independent consultant to institutional investors, his clients included several of the largest investment banking and consulting firms. His areas of expertise cover the range of applications of mathematics to investments, including performance and risk measurement; Monte Carlo simulation methods for asset-liability and asset allocation modeling and pension planning; dynamic hedging using futures and options; style mix determination; backtesting; and quadratic mean-variance optimization. Dr. Edesess has spoken at conferences on investment research and taught courses in international finance, economics, mathematics, statistics, systems analysis, and environmental policy at four universities. His articles have been published in the Wall Street Journal and the Journal of Portfolio Management, and he has been interviewed on CNBC. He holds a bachelor's degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in pure mathematics from Northwestern University.In addition to his work in investments, Dr. Edesess is active in the fields of environmental and resource economics and international development. He chairs the board of International Development Enterprises USA, a nonprofit focusing on increasing the wealth of poor rural smallholders in developing countries, and he has chaired the board of Rocky Mountain Institute, a prominent energy think tank in Snowmass, Colorado, and the Rocky Mountain Advisory Board of Environmental Defense. He has written for numerous publications and spoken at conferences on energy, sustainable development, economics, and investment. His articles on these topics have appeared in Technology Review, Rising Tide, the Christian Science Monitor, Rocky Mountain News, and Pensions and Investments.
