Advanced Investments

By: Steve L. Slezak, The Great Courses

Narrated by: Steve L. Slezak

This is an advanced course for investors in the market, covering cutting-edge investment principles and practices used by professionals. You learn hands-on techniques for analyzing the central problem of investing: How to determine if a potential investment is a good deal. Employing concepts from probability and statistics, you learn how to measure risk accurately. Then you explore methods for determining if a given security, such as a stock or bond, will generate returns that compensate for its risk.

Throughout these 24 in-depth lectures, you weigh the relative advantages of active and passive investment strategies. An active approach takes advantage of mispriced securities that can be traded for a profit. A passive strategy seeks to build a well-diversified portfolio that can be put on automatic pilot. Many investors combine these strategies, and Professor Slezak takes you through a wide range of cases that show how to devise a balanced approach.

His many useful tips include how to avoid the most common mistakes that investors make, why you should think in terms of net present value in evaluating a company, how to combine securities in order to control risk, and the importance of analyzing an investment before you act.

Professor Slezak is an expert who knows how to communicate effectively. He enlivens his presentation with colorful anecdotes and object lessons from the recent history of Wall Street. His parting advice: Don't be afraid of the market. Nothing is a sure thing, he stresses, but the market has performed consistently over the long term.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying reference material will be available in your Library section along with the audio.

©2014 The Great Courses (P)2014 The Teaching Company, LLC

slightly outdated

he tells you to not care if your shares are being lent out by your brokerage. you should care if your brokerage is making money off people betting against your investment.

he doesn't talk about pfof or payment for order flow. which is how brokerages use you to make money, yet you are not the customer

also data on the internet from Yahoo finance or other sources can and has been manipulated to push a narrative of a given company.

still he gives a great deal of good information.

Excellent content, but you need to watch the video

What did you like best about Advanced Investments? What did you like least?

The course content was excellent. However, because there's a lot of math/statistics involved, listening to equations being spoken leaves you missing out. I'm a long-time Teaching Company (aka The Great Courses) customer and I wish I had purchase this item directly from them in the video format. Although I was excited to see it on Audible (where it is also cheaper), it was just too hard to follow without actually seeing anything.

Certainly Advanced, Portfolio Theory

The audiobook goes over elements of 'portfolio theory' with detailed discussions of bond pricing, risk and returns as beta and alpha, and then some options/futures investing. Most of it went over my head, but for those who are comfortable with the basic terms, it is sufficiently advanced as a next step.

Hard To Follow Without Documentation

Would you try another book from The Great Courses and/or Professor Steve L. Slezak, PhD?

This is a great course with a lot of great information and that is the problem. Without the documentation, that Audible does not provide, this is a very very hard course to follow by just listening.

Would you be willing to try another one of Professor Steve L. Slezak, PhD’s performances?

Yes once you starting providing the documentation/text he would be using with the course.

Yes its Advanced!

Would you consider the audio edition of Advanced Investments to be better than the print version?

No, and the PDF can be printed out. I strongly suggest you print sections as you go if you want to get the most out of this audiobook/ lecture.

Would you be willing to try another book from The Great Courses? Why or why not?

Yes, they are the best!

Any additional comments?

Some of these reviews are bias! Yes its heavy in mathematics because valuation formulas, derivative pricing and every other mathematical example used in this audiobook/lecture that is used by professionals is mathematics heavy! My advice is brush up on your statistics. I am not a math person but I'm trying to learn to better my skills in finance. I have listened to this book a few times and it was not until I took a basic statistic class that I actually began to understand some of the terminology used in this book.

This information is essential if you are out to master investing, even for the novice investor.

Insightful and practical, depending on the reader!

Here's a short quiz to see if the audiobook format of this book can work with your style of thinking:

What is x if (1.01^x) = 1.02?

Think about it for ~15 seconds.

...
...
...

Your reaction might have been:
A) Seems like plain algebra. Take the log of both sides, okay xlog(1.01) = log(1.02), so x = log(1.02)/log(1.01)
B) Seems like 1.01 is a 1% increase. If I increase by 1% twice, that's a smidge more than 2% increase, so X would be (pause to think about the sign) a smidge less than 2.
C) Seems like math. Maybe I'd try when I was younger...

There's nothing wrong with reaction A. I'm saddened but certainly not judgmental about reaction C. But I can say with near certainty that you won't follow this audiobook well unless you had reaction B.

The professor talks through the actual algebra of every equation he sets up, to several sig figs, at least once a chapter. Understanding these equations is an important part of understanding the content. You might think that following his precise algebra (like reaction A) would be helpful. The problem is, audio is simply not a good format to convey that kind of symbolic manipulation. If you try, you'll end up like most other reviewers: totally flabbergasted by why anyone would think to make this an audiobook.

I eventually found there is a much better method to follow along: Pay close attention when he sets up the equation... and then tune out everything he says! While he blabs about the multiplications and lists out 3 decimal places, there is plenty of time to think about what you should expect the answer might be – slightly bigger than linear growth, slightly smaller than last years' interest rate, etc. Pausing the audio if needed. By the time he arrives at his conclusion, you can compare your answer to his, and correct your intuition accordingly. After this adjustment, I had no trouble with the format and rather enjoyed the math detours.

On the book itself
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The lectures take you from understanding compound interest to understanding most of the fundamental features of stocks, bonds, and the markets involving them. It gives great intuition for bonds and the various types, "the" interest rate, how these capital sources are used by companies making products, how to calculate stock prices from expected revenue steams and liabilities, how to calculate their risks, why investors have different risk tolerances, how they will trade risk in a rational market, and finally deriving the CAPM model: a global theory of equilibrium asset pricing.

These are all fascinating topics and things I understood very incompletely before reading this. The lecturer was clear and structured the course very well to build upon previous topics.

To all those with reaction B above, I highly recommend this course!

A Book of Irony

The professor admits up front that an active portfolio (your stocks actively traded) holds no advantage over an index fund (your stocks just sitting there), yet the rest of the lectures get into the various ways that you can actively manage your stocks (in futility, remember). So the lectures are informative in that respect. They get into bonds, too.

Another flaw are the equations. Not that there are loads of them (there are, and you cannot envision them in an audiobook), but that they all rely on initial assumptions, which, if wrong, only creates 'garbage out' (from 'garbage in'). They do help you think clearly, however, revealing basic relationships (inverse, parallel).

The last flaw is philosophical - the lectures embrace the casino mentality of investing rather than an enlightened one (one where you would 'invest' in an enterprise that will contribute to Broader Survival) (and you need to read the Philosophy of Broader Survival to understand that).

The book was engaging nevertheless, with interesting anecdotes, stories, and examples, while offering an insight on how money managers and the worlds of stocks and bonds operate in today's philosophically clueless world.

Not advanced at all

It's a basic course. Disappointing to pay for something that should be advanced and it's not

NOT great as an audiobook

Too complex and multiple formulas that might be easier to follow on paper vs audio.

Detail and descriptions

Very knowledgeable although to Hard to follow without notes or examples on paper. Generally like the great course content. This course is one that you need to engage with with example. This is especially that case if you don't have foundation in the subject.