>> It's easy to find books on contemporary business successes, or after-the-fact reports on failures. But one of the best micro-genres is books about companies that were doing well when the book came out, and that subsequently failed. Can anyone recommend good examples of these?
Good to Great is the classic of that "micro-genre", and perhaps what you had in mind? It's remarkable how many of the case studies collapsed so soon after it was published - Fannie Mae, Circuit City, etc.
There were definitely several books about GE at its peak, which you covered in a past article.
I remember reading a long time ago a Lee Iacocca book that I enjoyed, but I'm not sure if that's fair to say it subsequently failed. I suppose any book written about a major broker or bank or legacy airline would be part of the genre too, since most of them subsequently went bankrupt or had to be bailed out.
More broadly, you could include Dow 36,000, or even something like Rising Sun (although I would disagree that Japan failed in any way). Sort of interesting windows into the thought process of the past.
There was a best seller about Exxon not too long ago - it's hard to imagine now but it was recently the most valuable company in America, I think 10 years ago or so.
I'm not sure it's the open source model that's responsible for short sellers knowing what stocks to bet against if ARK has outflows (which, to be sure, in the ETF structure, doesn't directly imply share sales). Instead, I'd say it's intrinsic to the ETF model: having to publish the basket of shares a redemption will result in (to be completely fair, this doesn't directly imply sales) makes it plausible to guess the effect of redemptions on component prices.
In ARK's case, the tendency to end up with massive positions in illiquid stocks did this (you could probably model the effect of net-outflows from the various large-cap-heavy index ETFs, but that wouldn't quite be as dramatic (I don't totally buy Mike Green's "n weeks of SPY net-outflows will send the S&P to zero" theory)). The open-source model closes off an avenue for ARK to themselves be short the published basket relative to their holdings, but being an active ETF in illiquid names is the vast majority of ARK's problem.
I’have a suggestion to answer your question about contemporary business success books: Leading the revolution by Gary Hamel. In this book Gary describes Enron as a very successful model. Everyone knows the rest of the story.
>> It's easy to find books on contemporary business successes, or after-the-fact reports on failures. But one of the best micro-genres is books about companies that were doing well when the book came out, and that subsequently failed. Can anyone recommend good examples of these?
Good to Great is the classic of that "micro-genre", and perhaps what you had in mind? It's remarkable how many of the case studies collapsed so soon after it was published - Fannie Mae, Circuit City, etc.
There were definitely several books about GE at its peak, which you covered in a past article.
I remember reading a long time ago a Lee Iacocca book that I enjoyed, but I'm not sure if that's fair to say it subsequently failed. I suppose any book written about a major broker or bank or legacy airline would be part of the genre too, since most of them subsequently went bankrupt or had to be bailed out.
More broadly, you could include Dow 36,000, or even something like Rising Sun (although I would disagree that Japan failed in any way). Sort of interesting windows into the thought process of the past.
There was a best seller about Exxon not too long ago - it's hard to imagine now but it was recently the most valuable company in America, I think 10 years ago or so.
I'm not sure it's the open source model that's responsible for short sellers knowing what stocks to bet against if ARK has outflows (which, to be sure, in the ETF structure, doesn't directly imply share sales). Instead, I'd say it's intrinsic to the ETF model: having to publish the basket of shares a redemption will result in (to be completely fair, this doesn't directly imply sales) makes it plausible to guess the effect of redemptions on component prices.
In ARK's case, the tendency to end up with massive positions in illiquid stocks did this (you could probably model the effect of net-outflows from the various large-cap-heavy index ETFs, but that wouldn't quite be as dramatic (I don't totally buy Mike Green's "n weeks of SPY net-outflows will send the S&P to zero" theory)). The open-source model closes off an avenue for ARK to themselves be short the published basket relative to their holdings, but being an active ETF in illiquid names is the vast majority of ARK's problem.
I’have a suggestion to answer your question about contemporary business success books: Leading the revolution by Gary Hamel. In this book Gary describes Enron as a very successful model. Everyone knows the rest of the story.