Reading Minds and Markets: Minimizing Risk and Maximizing Returns in a Volatile Global Marketplace

Product Author Bios

Jack Ablin is an Executive Vice President and Chief Investment Officer for Harris Private Bank in Chicago. With more than 25 years of experience in the investment business, Mr. Ablin was a mortgage-backed securities trader, a fund manager as well as a Director of Investments. He served in the Finance Department in the School of Management at Boston University and was the President of the Boston Security Analysts Society. Jack makes his home in Chicago with his wife, LeeAnn, and daughters, Elise and Emily.

Suzanne McGee has spent more than two decades writing about business and finance, including 13 years at the Wall Street Journal in Toronto, New York, and London. She is currently a contributing editor at Barron’s and a regular contributor to Institutional Investor. Her work has appeared in the Financial Times, INC, Art + Auction, and the New York Post. She is a recipient of both a Gerald Loeb Award and SABEW’s Best in Business Award. Suzanne lives in Brooklyn, where she is now at work on a book about Wall Street.

“Read Jack Ablin’s ‘five factor’ approach to investing and you not only will sleep better at night, you’ll be a smarter, wiser human being. Ablin takes you on his twenty-year journey toward a unified, rational approach to investing that can help you weather even the most turbulent financial storms. This book may be one of the best investments you will ever make.”

--John Callaway, Senior Correspondent, WTTW, Public Television

“This book is based on verifiable data trends and years of experience with a broad array of economic and market numbers. Regret over investment losses need not lead investors to disengage their brains or to be robbed again by schemes hawked as ‘new and improved.’ Reading Minds and Markets will help jump-start an honest investment dialogue that has been sidetracked by excesses of greed and fear.”

--Bill Barnhart, Former Financial Editor and Columnist for the Chicago Tribune

“The author has taken the complex world of investing and provided an extremely practical approach to success where others have failed miserably. His grasp of the financial markets makes him eminently qualified to develop an extremely sound and practical approach in order to protect and enhance wealth for investors.”

--Edward (“Ned”) Riley, Jr., Former Chief Investment Officer for State Street Global Advisors and Chief Investment Officer, Riley Asset Management

“With nearly three decades of experience, Jack Ablin’s superb intellectual thinking is reflected in Reading Minds and Markets. This is great reading for the motivated investor.”

--Professor Israel Shaked, Finance and Economics Department, Boston University, School of Management

You can do more to protect yourself from market risks and down markets. The secret: Understand the big picture and know when to shift money toward more promising industry groups, sectors, or asset classes. This strategy is called “global macro investing”--and, as Chief Investment Officer for Harris Private Bank, Jack Ablin has used it to deliver results for many of the world’s wealthiest families and individuals.

In Reading Minds and Markets, Ablin distills his techniques into a remarkably simple, commonsense five-step plan that any investor can use. You’ll discover how to anticipate some of the more significant shifts in global markets and move investments toward areas that are more likely to grow. Equally important, you’ll learn how to overcome bad habits that inevitably lead to failure--habits all too often reinforced by the financial media.

In today’s unforgiving markets, you need to make smarter high-level decisions and fewer mistakes: This book will help you do both.

• Why you must take a top-down view of the market--and how to do it
  Avoid getting caught off-guard in choppy, highly volatile markets
• Respond to the market’s powerful signals about relative risk
  Master strategies for improving return without  increasing risk
• Discover the five factors that consistently tell you where to invest
  Cut through the clutter of irrelevant data: find what matters and use it
• Stop being your own worst enemy
  Overcome the #1 obstacle to structuring your best portfolio: human nature

www.readingmindsandmarkets.com

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 The Year of Investing Dangerously     1

Chapter 2 The World of Global Macro     11

Chapter 3 Exploit Your Edge; Eliminate Your Weakness I--Beating the Street     27

Chapter 4 Exploit Your Edge; Eliminate Your Weakness II--Battling Yourself     41

Chapter 5 Identifying Metrics     59

Chapter 6 The Five Factors: Putting Data to Work     81

Chapter 7 The First Factor: Momentum--Befriending the Trend     97

Chapter 8 The Second Factor: The Economy--Headwind or Tailwind for Stocks?      115

Chapter 9 The Third Factor: Liquidity--Follow the Money     133

Chapter 10 The Fourth Factor: Psychology--Greed Versus Fear     153

Chapter 11 The Fifth Factor: Fundamentals and Valuation     171

Chapter 12 Putting It Together     189

Index     203