Amazon.com
Investors -- be they aggressive or conservative, self-directed or professionally managed -- are always on the lookout for an edge. And in James O'Shaughnessy's What Works on Wall Street: A Guide to the Best-Performing Investment Strategies of All Time, they'll find a solid one: authoritative analysis of popular practices from the past. The author examines three decades of stock market data to show how 15 of the most common investment tactics have fared over time. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
The Wall Street Journal, 09/15/97
"... analysts praised his stock-picking strategy, explained in his well-received book. In it, he digs into more than 40 years of data to find out what strategies would have picked the winning stocks."
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``. . .analysts praised his stock-picking strategy, explained in his well-received book. In it, he digs into more than 40 years of data to find out what strategies would have picked the winning stocks.'' (The Wall Street Journal )
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"The best investment book of 1996. Very likely, it will be the most influential book on investing in this decade."Stock Traders Almanac
"...O'Shaughnessy's conclusion that some strategies do produce consistently strong results while others underperform could shake up the investment business."Barron's
The New York Times and Business Week bestseller, What Works on Wall Street is now updated throughout to include the new data and 50 new sample portfolios. Hailed as "a great book" by Forbes, What Works on Wall Street is a must read for any investor looking to make savvy, historically informed decisions.
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This consistently bestselling guide explores the investment strategies that have provided the best returns over the past 50 years--and which are the top performers today.
The Motley Fool, Randy Befumo
What Works on Wall Street was probably the most anticipated investment book of 1996. James O'Shaughnessy gained unprecedented access to Standard & Poor's Compustat database and back-tested the returns generated by various clearly defined investment approaches over the past 40 years. The book challenges quite a bit of the conventional wisdom about portfolio management and is a compelling, although statistically flawed, work. In What Works on Wall Street, O'Shaughnessy examines the performance of the highest and lowest price/earnings, price/sales, price/book value, relative strength, yield and earnings growth stocks over various periods, trying to find which types of companies tended to perform best. Although you can quibble with a lot of the data, the sheer magnitude of the task O'Shaughnessy has undertaken is impressive. His final, multifactor strategies that generated the best investments over time are very interesting, particularly the Cornerstone Value approach, which is very similar to the Dow Dividend Approach with a few other bells and whistles.
O'Shaughnessy's book and its findings should be read, discussed and disputed by all investors. However much one can criticize the work for being too focused on the plight of professional money managers looking to pick fifty stocks and not individual investors looking to pick five, the information is valuable and compelling. The only warning that I would give to readers is to be aware of a methodological error in the way O'Shaughnessy does the statistics. Because of the time required, O'Shaughnessy and his team looked at how the 50 highest or lowest stocks in any particular group performed. Extrapolating the performance of extreme data points to the entire set of data being studied is not entirely correct, as there are many processes in nature where the middle actually does not act like the extremes. Mass and velocity in physics are one example, where super-light and super-dense objects both do not obey the laws of physics, while everything in between does. With this caveat, I think an investor can learn a lot from the book. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From the Back Cover
Critical praise for the First Edition of What Works on Wall Street:
"Five $$$$$ rating. An indispensable classic...Downright momentous...should be required reading for everyone in the investment world, especially investment advisors and money managers. O'Shaughnessy's conclusions are, to me, nothing short of astonishing.''Roger Segal, The Street.Com
"O'Shaughnessy's study is already making waves in the investment community...could well become a classic.''Paul Sturm, SmartMoney
"What investment strategies have worked best over the past 40 years? Ask this man."Barron's
"O'Shaughnessy's conclusion that some strategies do product consistently strong results while others underperform could shake up the investment business."Barron's
"O'Shaughnessy's latest, What Works on Wall Street, is a serious inquiry into the investment strategies that stand up under long-term scrutiny and is refreshing research for every investor."Stocks and Commodities
"James O'Shaughnessy...has enshrined P/S in the investing hall of fame in his superb new book, What Works on Wall Street."James K. Glassman, Washington Post
"I wish that back when I first wrote about Price Sales Ratios, I'd had the computer power O'Shaughnessy now brings to bear. I'd be much richer today. Great book. Almost any investor will benefit from it."Ken Fisher, columnist, Forbes
About the Author
James P. O'Shaughnessy is Chairman and CEO of O'Shaughnessy Capital Management, Inc., a widely known Greenwich, Connecticut, investment advisory firm. He also serves as the manager of the four no-load funds in the O'Shaughnessy Funds family. Long recognized as one of America's leading financial experts and a pioneer in quantitative equity analysis, he has been called a "world beater" and a "statistical guru" by Barron's. Higher Returns said he is "one of the most original market thinkers we've come across." Forbes pronounced his first book Invest Like the Best "awesome" and named it one of the best financial books of the year. The Stock Trader's Almanac called Invest Like the Best the "Best Investment Book of 1994." O'Shaughnessy's investment strategies have been featured in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Financial Times, The Los Angeles Times, London's Daily Mail, Japan's Nikkei Shimbun Daily, Newsweek, Barron's, Forbes, Smart Money, Worth, and Money. He appears regulary on CNN and CNBC. He lives in Greenwich, Connecticut, with his wife and three children.