Beyond the Bull

By Rick Nason, PhD, CFA
Partner, RSD Solutions Inc.

I just finished reading “Beyond the Bull” by Ken Norquay (BPS Books, 2008).  In this very refreshing look at investing, Norquay, a CMT and Director and Chief Market Strategist at CastleMoore Inc. puts forward a five step financial investment development program that draws on an eclectic mix of the practicalities of the market, psychology, warfare and even Buddhist practices. 

From my previous sentence you might believe that this is a new-age California book that recommends some weird investment philosophy based on magic crystals or mood rings or some similar useless crap.  However your belief would be incorrect.  Norquay, an experienced and successful investment professional, understands that the market has more concrete elements to it than that.  Additionally he also understands that there are more than the objective components to successful investing.  That brings us to the major contribution of this book which is outlining a path or strategy for balancing the various subjective and objective components that comprise successful investing.  (The author breaks this up into a four component model that has intellectual, emotional and instinctive components which are subjective combined with an objective component.)

One aspect of the book that I would particularly like to pick up is the author’s suggestion to “Try to feel the economy as well as think about it”.  All too often as investors (or risk managers) we tend to focus on one aspect (feeling versus thinking) to the exclusion of the other.  Fortunately for those of us who like a challenge, the financial markets reward those of us who like to be diversified in our approach to risk and financial management.  Beyond the Bull succeeds in providing investors a realistic and practical guide to developing the awareness and skills necessary to appropriately incorporate both feeling and thinking into investing.

This book will be of interest to retail investors, and the salespeople who service them.  Unfortunately few salespeople are likely to get past the first few chapters as Norquay convincingly lays bare the weaknesses of the traditional “sales bull”.  I would appreciate seeing a follow-up book to this that is geared more to the institutional money manager, as I believe the approaches presented in this book will also work at the more advanced level.

When I received this book I was expecting a traditional charting based book, or a take on the now well worn behavioral finance path.  The refreshing aspect of Beyond the Bull is that it takes a different path that is truly “beyond the bull” that is so prevalent in the how to invest genre.