《Capital Account》简介：

Capital Account relates the story of the world's greatest investment bubble from the perspective of professional investors. The book, comprised of selected reports from Marathon Asset Management, a successful global investment firm, explains how shareholder value the notion that companies should be run in the interests of their shareholders became corrupted in this era of frenzied finance. Senior managers, succumbing to the lure of stock option fortunes, took to manipulating their company's earnings. Professional investors, interested only in maintaining their investment performance over the next quarter, were willing abettors. The croupiers' of Wall Street, also know as investment bankers, whipped up the euphoria and peddled to investors superficially plausible stories, MacGuffins', in order to generate huge fees for themselves. As a result, by the turn of the century almost the entire investment community had become fixated with chasing short-term profits at the expense of long-term returns for clients. By the end of 2002 this cynical game had ended in investment disaster the world's stock markets having produced more than $15 trillion of losses since their peak. Yet to a large extent, the outcome was predictable to those investors who had retained a disciplined approach to investment analysis throughout the bull market. This book introduces the capital cycle' approach to investment an approach that brings together ideas from the fields of behavioral finance, economic theory and business analysis. Capital cycle analysis – based on the apparently simple insight that investor euphoria leads to excessive investment in the real world and subsequent poor returns for shareholders – enabled Marathon to identify at an early stage the inevitable collapse of the technology and telecoms bubble.

《Capital Account》摘录：

The Capital Cycle and High-Return Businesses The direction of the capital cycle depends on whether companies within an industry succeed or fail to earn their cost of capital. When an industry enjoys above average returns, its value in the stock market will normally exceed the replacement cost of its assets. An industry's aggregate returns also largely determine changes in the competitive environment. The Capital Cycle and Low-Return Businesses ...the turnaround of General Dynamics and its dramatic share price performance illustrate two key aspects of the capital cycle approach to investment. First, shareholder returns are not necessarily determined by whether a company's sales are rising or falling, nor whether the market in which it operates is growing or shrinking. Rather, the most impor...