Amazon.ca:Customer reviews: Safe Haven: Investing for Financial Storms

Absolutely no insight into how to mitigate risk

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on October 31, 2021

This is a ridiculously bad book. His first book, the Dal of Capital, is well written and full of helpful lessons. This book tells you absolutely nothing about what to do to follow his notion of risk mitigation. He admits as much in the introduction to his book. So after all the noise, you will not have any actionable steps to take. From that perspective, the book is a dismal failure. I really wish he given us a small snippet of what steps the average investor can take after reading his book.

2 people found this helpful

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Aidan

A very disappointing book.

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on August 30, 2021

Verified Purchase

The book offers no insights except a profound sounding title. Long on technical jargon, and poor writing style for non egghead audience.

One person found this helpful

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wayne

Disappointing

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on October 5, 2021

Verified Purchase

Extremely disappointing. Could have written the entire book in a few sentences.

One person found this helpful

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Pedro Rangel

He won't hand you the secrets of the Universe(-a)

Reviewed in Germany 🇩🇪 on January 14, 2023

Verified Purchase

The book is fantastic. From the reviews I have read, many people buy it expecting Spitznagel to reveal the secret formula of Universa's tail-hedging strategy. Instead, this book is a guide on investment philosophy (quite literally). As a quant myself, I know that his strategy, first, is extremely complicated (because Universa likely does not make its money just by buying OTM puts on the S&P that sometimes pay off, but they probably do some kind of market making that allows them to profit from the delta, gamma, etc. and the explosive price of the option itself, not just the payoff on the underlying) and quite dangerous for a retail investor and, second, is proprietary. So, what Spitznagel instead gives us is an epistemological toolbox to think about tail risks and gives us a framework to test whether something is a safe haven or not. This may not give you a magic trading strategy, but the classification of safe havens is the first necessary step. The main take-aways for me are:
1. Focus on extremes. One extreme loss is all you need to travel down the "Bernoulli" falls. In more technical terms: extreme losses have a non-linear impact on your return. Focus on keeping your losses small, they may be unrecoverable (amor fati and so on).
2. The objective of an investor should be to maximize CAGR and not to concentrate on having an "optimal" portfolio with the best Sharpe ratio or some other metric that won't let you take any meaningful risk or may even "diworsify" the portfolio.
3. Hypothesis testing for whether something is a safe haven: this is probably the most disappointing for many readers because he does not tell how to implement a "homemade" safe haven. But, hey, the first step towards finding something is to have the criteria to know when something isn't that something.

At last, I thoroughly enjoyed his vast knowledge on other fields other than mathematics and finance. Mark is a polymath and, at least for me, a kind of role model. He even loves Mahler!

One person found this helpful

Amazon Customer

Great value, but not a leisure read

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 29, 2022

Verified Purchase

I first came across the book when I was looking for the recent update of Mark’s friend: Nassim Nicolas Taleb; a famous and outspoken inventor and author. If Nassim’s writings are more from the philosophical aspect on how to survive (and hopeful thrive) in an environment disproportionately impacted by rare events, this book provides the first step to connect the philosophy to real world implementation. While it illustrates under the context of investing, the underlying message can be applied to almost all aspects of life.

The book has changed my thinking process, and I can strongly recommend. However, I do want to point out that it felt a little dry at my first read. One of the reasons is that I was treating it purely as a leisure read and didn’t concentrate much. However, the insights started shocking me when I later re-read it seriously. It’s not a technical book, but is a little more technical than Nassim’s books. Prepare yourself and enjoy the feast.

3 people found this helpful

dancinghorse

The book I received misses 20 pages towards the end. Really disappointed.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on February 15, 2023

Verified Purchase

Even though I will receive a free replacement, I have to return the item and therefore would lose all my notes!

I really enjoyed the book itself. The five star is for the book. The quality of printing is really horrible.

Phil

Technically WRONG, but great stuff about grazing animals!

Reviewed in Germany 🇩🇪 on February 21, 2023

Verified Purchase

Fun to read and makes you think for a little bit…. BUT:
The stock market, as the great Benjamin Graham taught us, is a voting machine in the short term and a weighing machine in the long term. So there is no path dependence on the outcome of the stockmarket, because it is based in reality and real growth.
The technical part of the book is therefore BS!

Nassim Taleb and Spritznagel think they are the only ones who know about longtails, at least they always make it look that way. All great investors know about it, but ok. How about great insurances? I bet they know… anyway.

They found a very lame way to make money and think it is because they are so smart. The stock market crashes from time to time…. Big deal.

I finally found out why Ireland is so green. That was always on my mind. Thanks

One person found this helpful

James K.

Mathematical analysis that is formal and makes sense

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on November 12, 2022

Verified Purchase

As a PhD in the analytical engineering sciences, I fully understand and endorse the mathematical principals and approach. My one contrary remark is that the methods ignore that circumstances are often known and a circumstance blind analysis does not capture that reality. The author would dismiss this as having a crystal ball, with some validity but not entirely. The other gap is not showing the effects of continued investment (when working) or continued withdrawal (when retired) with a specific endpoint (e.g. death) which could result in a nonstationary policy.

One person found this helpful

filmlover

I'm so much smarter than you, and you can't afford to play with me

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 22, 2021

Verified Purchase

I waited for months to read this book in a way I have not waited for many books. In short, pretty disappointed. Make no mistake, there is some wonderful content and it is worth reading just for the collection of quotes from other great thinkers contained in its pages. The problem being, the primary lesson to be learned by reading this book is, "No financial risk insurance other than mine works and you need to figure out how to do it on your on your own because I'm not going to teach you." In all fairness, Spitznagel says as much in chapter one but you keep reading this thing thinking, "He's gotta give me something..." In fact, you have to do some external digging before you to confirm that even if the book is a sales pitch for Universa Investments, it takes $50 million out of a $1.5 billon pool of assets to gain admittance to Spitznagel's tail risk mitigating alchemy. I use that term very deliberately as scientific method is such a prominent pillar of the book and yet none of his method is actually disclosed. Not terribly scientific. Now, I am all in for a challenge, relish the hunt, and love the truly Douglas Adams style of telling a story based on what something isn't; but there was virtually no proactive payoff to the time invested in reading the majority of this book. If you want to gain some wonderful insights into what the author claims doesn't work; by all means, dig in! There is some very provocative stuff in his explanations and models of why things don't work as Safe Havens, but I found myself asking, "So what the hell should those of us not on the Forbes list do?" If you are looking for anything proactive beyond, "When you are worth $1.5 billion, give me a call." you may want to invest your time elsewhere. Hint: If you just want the author's very relevant "Don't list" skip to chapter 6.

246 people found this helpful

Stefan Stefanov

Groundbreaking

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on February 21, 2022

Verified Purchase

The first time I read it on kindle. I knew it it was very important book. These ideas were always with me, intuitively, and that is the reason I never bankrupted as a professional gambler.
But with the physical book i had to deconstruct every idea inside - why, how it worked. Made files in Excel to calculate all the BEV/EM and laughed myself out when I discovered that Mark Spitznagel used in his St. Petersburg merchant primer, the exactly same example as Bernoulli's Gaius.
Everybody has to work it out for himself - ho much exactly will cost him an insurance, depending on personal wealth, price of the insurance, etc. There is no single on-size-fit all answer.
It takes time, do your own calculations, it is worth it.
Great Job!

2 people found this helpful

5 star		57%
4 star		21%
3 star		11%
2 star		3%
1 star		8%

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