The Dao of Capital: Austrian Investing in a Distorted World Hardcover - 2013 - 1st Edition

From the jacket flap

As today's preeminent doomsday investor Mark Spitznagel describes his Daoist and roundabout investment approach, "one gains by losing and loses by gaining." This is Austrian Investing, an archetypal, counterintuitive, and proven approach, gleaned from the 150-year-old Austrian School of Economics, that is both timeless and exceedingly timely.

In The Dao of Capital, hedge fund manager and tail-hedging pioneer Spitznagel takes the reader on a gripping, circuitous journey from the Chicago trading pits, over the coniferous boreal forests and canonical strategists from Warring States China to Napoleonic Europe to burgeoning industrial America, to the great economic thinkers of late 19th-century Austria, ultimately arriving at his central investment methodology of Austrian Investing. Victory comes not from waging the immediate decisive battle, but rather from the roundabout approach of seeking the intermediate positional advantage (what he calls shi), of aiming at the indirect means rather than directly at the ends. The monumental challenge is in seeing time differently, in a whole new intertemporal dimension, one that is so contrary to our wiring.

With one of the top returns on capital of the financial crisis, as well as over a career, Spitznagel is the first to condense the theories of Ludwig von Mises and his Austrian School of Economics into a cohesive and highly effective investment methodology. From identifying the monetary distortions and non-randomness of stock market routs (or black swans, Spitznagel's bread and butter) to scorned highly-productive assets, The Dao of Capital, in Ron Paul's words from the Foreword, "brings Austrian economics from the ivory tower to the investment portfolio."

The Dao of Capital provides a rare and accessible look through the lens of one of today's great investors to discover a profound harmony with the market process--a harmony that is so essential today.