Though some guesses are more likely to be correct than others, an investor never truly knows what the outcome of an investment will be. The study of cycles is really about how to position your portfolio for the possible outcomes that lie ahead. There is no such thing as a market that is separate from—and unaffected by—the people who make it up.

Coming in late 2018, Mastering the Market Cycle addresses some of the most topical questions for investors, providing not just insightful thoughts that relate to our current times, but a conclusive framework that could have been valid at any point in history, empowering readers with the tools they need to find the right balance between risk and opportunity and between prudence and aggressiveness. You now have a general sense of short-term market cycles and the potential benefits of paying attention to your position within them.If the secular growth rate is always positive, couldn’t you just invest and let your money sit there, allowing the short-term cycles to cancel each other out while you profit from the secular trend’s gradual growth? Thus it shouldn’t come as a surprise that more unwise investments are made in good times than in bad. Along the way, it discusses multiple recent financial cycles, teasing out the lessons that can be learned from each. One of the most important things needed to achieve investment success is to clearly define your investment philosophy and diligently act upon that philosophy. Can’t argue with the chap, he’s a serious thinker on the subject but I realised early on I didn’t want to argue with him or hear anymore on economic theory.

And one of the few books to be always held at hand for all of us who are inevitably presented with great abundance of investment decisions throughout our lives. The risk is completing a project while the economy is headed for recession with a rising supply/shrinking demand in the market. Widespread risk tolerance—or a high degree of investor comfort with risk—is the greatest harbinger of subsequent market declines. For me, the bottom line of all of this is that the greatest source of investment risk is the belief that there is no risk.The pendulum careens from one extreme to the other, spending almost no time at “the happy medium” and rather little in the range of reasonableness.

Economies, companies and markets operate in accordance with patterns which are influenced by naturally occurring events combined with human psychology and behaviour. But the force behind regression continues to exert itself, the momentum pushes the cycle past the midpoint to the next high or low.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. But whenever the pendulum is near either extreme, it is inevitable that it will move back toward the midpoint sooner or later.

It should be adjusted as you move through a market cycle, assuming you can handle being wrong at times.

Both are determined by one ticket (the outcome) being pulled from a bowlful (the full range of possible outcomes). But rather the investor who bought the property from the bank amid distress and then rode the up-cycle. Long-term economic growth is driven by the number of hours worked and productivity per working hour. Marks reveals the hidden logic in carefully pinpointing market trends so that investors have the opportunity to improve their results.