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Michael Dever

Michael Dever
Author

About the Author

Michael Dever has been on the front line of investment innovation and trading for more than 30 years. After three years of private research and trading he founded Brandywine Asset Management in 1982. For the past three decades, Mr. Dever and Brandywine have been entrusted to manage the money of global banks, major corporations and high net worth individuals who have been attracted to Mr. Dever's innovative investment philosophy.

His out-of-the-box thinking and investment success have also made him a featured subject of three books, Bulls, Bears and Millionaires, Market Beaters and The Investor's Guide to Hedge Funds.

In addition to his investment management background, Mr. Dever is also a technology entrepreneur. He founded spree.com, one of the first ecommerce communities, in 1996. Spree grew to being the 7th most trafficked ecommerce web site by 1998. Following a venture funding round in 1999, Mr. Dever left spree and founded Mind Drivers, a venture development company that has launched and grown Internet-based technology companies such as Internetseer (sold in 2007 to Landmark Communications, the founders of The Weather Channel) and marine.com.

Today, Mr. Dever devotes his time to running Brandywine Asset Management, which follows Mr. Dever's Return Driver based methodology to trade broadly diversified portfolios in the global currency, interest rate, stock index, metals, energy and agricultural cash, futures and options markets.

Mr. Dever lives near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania with his wife Kim and three sons, Mitchell, Matthew and Charley. He has a bachelor degree in business from West Chester University (1981) and obtained his CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER™ certification in 1985.

More information can be found at www.brandywine.com.


The Writing of
Jackass Investing

The year was 1999. Everyone "knew" that the sure path to financial independence was to simply buy stocks and hold on for the long run; that a diversified portfolio was one that held a variety of stocks, such as large caps, small caps, and maybe even a few from other countries; that government regulations ensured a safe investing environment; and that commodities and futures trading were a sure path to reduced wealth. I vehemently disagreed and viewed these supposed "truths" to be, in actuality, costly myths. It was in that environment that I resolved to write Jackass Investing.

Over the following decade I cataloged dozens of investment myths, and over the years researched the basis for each one. In this book I condense that list to 20 of the most pervasive. My purpose is not just to expose each myth, but to show people how they can profit by exploiting the myths. This required an extensive amount of research, both to show why each myth is just that - a myth - and not a fact, and also to create the investment approach that you, the reader, could use to profit from the behavior of those people who believed in - and invested pursuant to - each myth.

As a result, Jackass Investing is really two books in one. The first is the print (and electronic) book. It contains 300 pages of research and narrative designed to expose each myth. I've written this book to be entertaining as well as informative, and incorporate numerous comparisons between the myths and popular culture (one of my favorites, and most valuable, is the comparison between George Costanza on Seinfeld and the behavior of most so-called "investors"). The second part is the online "Action Section". It is here that I reveal specific "Trading Strategies" that you can employ to create a "Free Lunch" portfolio. A Free Lunch portfolio produces both greater returns and lower risk than the "conventional" portfolio that is advocated by the vast majority of financial professionals and publications.

My goal, as I state in the Introduction to the book, is "to put to rest the investment paradigm that has been overpreached and accepted without hesitation, despite its obvious flaws, for far too long" and to help my readers "transform their lives and gain what every adult in the modern world dreams of and rarely achieves ... financial security."

Best wishes,
Mike Dever

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