Michael Mauboussin Bio, Books, Papers, Quotes, Research

A depository of everything written about and by Michael Mauboussin

Michael Mauboussin: Background & bio

UPDATED 06/06/2023

Michael Mauboussin is currently the Head of Global Financial Strategies at Credit Suisse. Previously, he was Chief Investment Strategist at Legg Mason Capital Management and worked as a packaged food industry analyst at Credit Suisse during 1992. He was named Chief U.S. Investment Strategist in 1999.

Michael began his career at Drexel Burnham Lambert in the 1980s.

Michael Mauboussin is a former president of the Consumer Analyst Group of New York and was repeatedly named to Institutional Investor’s All-America Research Team and The Wall Street Journal All-Star survey in the food industry group.

Mauboussin has been an adjunct professor of finance at Columbia Business School since 1993. Additionally, he is on the faculty of the Heilbrunn Center for Graham and Dodd Investing.

Michael Mauboussin received the Dean’s Award for Teaching Excellence in 2009 and during 2001 BusinessWeek’s Guide to the Best Business Schools highlighted Mauboussin as one of the school’s “Outstanding Faculty,” a distinction received by only seven professors.

Michael Mauboussin has authored several best-selling books including The Success Equation: Untangling Skill and Luck in Business, Sports, and Investing; Think Twice: Harnessing the Power of Counterintuition; More Than You Know: Finding Financial Wisdom in Unconventional Places-Updated and Expanded. More Than You Know has been named one of “The 100 Best Business Books of All Time”.

Michael Mauboussin: Notable Research

One Job Expectations and the Role of Intangible Investments
BIN There, Done That: Anticipating revisions in market expectations is the key to generating long-term excess returns as an investor.
The Real Role of Dividends in Building Wealth: Michael Mauboussin argues that for dividends to be included as a source in accumulating capital, the investor must reinvest dividends.
Blaming the Rat: Mauboussin talks about the relationship between incentives and behaviour.literature shows that the relationship between incentives and behaviour is more complex that what these scientists originally thought — helpful for investors who are on the lookout for driven leaders who have good capital allocation skills
Untangling Skill and Luck: Michael Mauboussin provides framework on how to differentiate between skill and luck. One of the most difficult things a fund investor has to do.
It’s all about Managing for Value: Mauboussin discusses that the primary goal of a corporation is to maximize its long-term shareholder value.
A Surge in the Urge to Merge: Michael Mauboussin writes that companies making acquisitions in the early part of the cycle deliver the best returns
See For Yourself: Michael Mauboussin stresses the importance to carefully sort through the source of data and verifying the accuracy of claims.The investing world is no different with many misleading beliefs floating around.
Show Me the Money: Michael Mauboussin points out the shortcomings of earnings as a tool for assessing a company’s economic reality.
Death, Taxes, and Reversion to the Mean: Mauboussin writes that investors should be aware of the models that analyst use to predict future performance, notably returns on invested capital. Analysts should incorporate the concept of mean reversion in their model, tempering the optimism inherent in their forecasts.
Turtles in Omaha: Mauboussin argues that the qualities that make investors great are mainly emotional and psychological. The story of the Turtle Traders of Richard Dennis and Bill Eckhardt.
The Importance of Diverse Thinking: Michael Mauboussin refers to the concept of Charlie Munger’s use of different mental models to approach investing. The logic of multidisciplinary approach to investing provides investors new tools to solve complex problems.
Long Term Investing in a Short Term World
Common Errors in DCF Models
Size Matters: Michael Mauboussin emphasizes the importance of position sizing in investing.
Clear Thinking about Share Repurchase: Michael Mauboussin comments on the idea that share buyback are better than dividends. Not all buybacks are created equal.

Michael Mauboussin: Books

The Success Equation: Untangling Skill and Luck in Business, Sports, and Investing.

Michael Mauboussin untangles the intricate strands of skill and luck, defines them, and provides useful frameworks for analyzing their relative contributions. He offers concrete suggestions for how to put these insights to work to your advantage in business and other dimensions of life.

Think Twice: Harnessing the Power of Counterintuition

Michael Mauboussin argues that we often fall victim to simplified mental routines that prevent us from coping with the complex realities inherent in important judgment calls. Yet these cognitive errors are preventable. In this engaging book, Mauboussin shows us how to recognize and avoid common mental missteps. These include misunderstanding cause-and-effect linkages, not considering enough alternative possibilities in making a decision, and relying too much on experts.

More Than You Know: Finding Financial Wisdom in Unconventional Places (Columbia Business School Publishing)

Offering invaluable tools to understand better the concepts of choice and risk, More Than You Know is a unique blend of practical advice and sound theory, sampling from a wide variety of sources and disciplines. Mauboussin builds on the ideas of visionaries, including Warren Buffett and E. O. Wilson, but also finds wisdom in a broad and deep range of fields, such as casino gambling, horse racing, psychology, and evolutionary biology. He analyzes the strategies of poker experts David Sklansky and Puggy Pearson and pinpoints parallels between mate selection in guppies and stock market booms.

Expectations Investing: Reading Stock Prices for Better Returns

Expectations Investing offers a fundamentally new alternative for identifying value-price gaps, built around a deceptively simple and obvious tool: a company’s stock price.