Stocks markets go up and down, but no matter what the economy is doing, people worldwide continue to drink, smoke, gamble, and fight. Why not invest in vice? Vice Fund Manager, Dan Ahrens focuses on "sin stocks"- tobacco, alcohol, adult entertainment, gambling, and aerospace/defense, contending that even during an abysmal economy, people will continue to indulge in these goods and services. In Investing in Vice, Ahrens explores all major aspects of the vice industry and provides traders and investors with: o A brief history of each principal vice industry o Strategies for building a profitable portfolio o Charts of each industry's stock performance o Instructions on how to invest in vice-pros and cons of full service brokers, managed portfolios, and mutual funds o Top Picks-of the best companies, and top stock holdings o Reasons why Socially Responsible Investing may not work With its lighthearted tone and simple approach, Investing in Vice is the ultimate defense in these troubled economic times.

A one-of-a-kind guide to investing in vice industries Although vices such as alcohol, tobacco, and gambling may be deemed socially irresponsible, in the investment world, these stocks continue to dramatically outperform the S&P 500 in this depressed market. Stocking Up on Sin shows readers how to get in on this hot investment trend and make the most out of publicly traded companies that deal with "vice" products such as coffee, weapons, alcohol, and tobacco. Caroline Waxler (New York, NY) is a New York-based financial journalist. She contributes regularly to Worth and Glamour magazines as well as the Financial Times. She was also the ghostwriter for Worth's Greatest Stock Picks of All Time.

In this paper, we empirically test the extent to which a portfolio of socially not responsible firms screened out of a market portfolio will trade at a discount. We create a set of global and domestic sin indexes consisting of a large number of publicly traded socially not responsible stocks around the world belonging to what we label as the Sextet of Sin: adult entertainment, alcohol, gambling, nuclear power, tobacco, and weapons. We compare their stock market performance directly with a set of virtue comparables consisting of the most important in-ternational socially responsible investment indexes. Employing a multi-factor performance measurement framework and recent boot-strap procedures for robust performance testing, we find no compelling evidence in the data that ethical and unethical screens lead to a sig-nificant difference in their financial performance.

This paper assumes the role of advocatus diaboli by testing whether an investment in sin stocks can financially outperform an investment in socially responsible stocks. We create a set of global, regional, and domestic portfolios consisting of a large number of stocks belonging to what could be labeled as a sextet of sin: adult entertainment, alcohol, gambling, nuclear power, tobacco, and weapons. We assess the performance of sin stocks against well-known benchmarks, and rerun the identical assessment for socially responsible stocks. We find no compelling evidence that sin stocks, or socially responsible stocks outperform or under-perform, and establish this result in several ways. Consistent with this finding, a hedge portfolio long in sin stocks and short in socially responsible stocks does not outperform the market, either. However, sin stocks are substantially tilted towards value, bear less market risk with an average beta below one, and are prone to momentum relative to socially responsible stocks.

Several recent studies led by Hong & Kacperzcyk (2009, Journal of Financial Economics) document that companies in industries perceived as sinful - so called sin stocks (i.e. alcohol, tobacco, gambling) - deliver a significant and positive abnormal stock market performance. This potentially attractive characteristics make these sin stocks a relevant investment opportunity for pension funds. In fact, following a rather conservative interpretation of pension funds' fiduciary duty, one might argue that pension funds have to investment overproportionally in sin stocks due to their seemingly superior returns to act in the best financial interest of their beneficiaries. This best financial interest, however, is unlikely the best interest of the beneficiary from a wider wellbeing perspective as, for instance, investments in tobacco companies are unlikely supportive of public health and hence beneficiaries' life expectancy. Before one dives into this legal paradoxon it is worth considering the practicalities of investing in these so called sin stocks, as the academic studies documenting their preferential characteristics used nearly exclusively hypothetical portfolios and not actual investment funds. In fact, only one sin stock based investment fund exists to the best our of knowledge, the Vice Fund. In this chapter, we pursue the first in depth analysis of the financial attractiveness of the Vice Fund, which penalizes instead of rewards responsible corporations. Despite the financial potential of the Vice Fund's underlying sin stocks has recently been indicated, we find the Vice Fund's abnormal return to be statistically indistinguishable from zero. Interestingly, the Vice Fund managers possess significantly value destructing directional trading and crisis management skills. Consequently, we cannot see any practical reason why pension funds would have to invest overproportionally in sin stocks, as their actually realised investment performance is no better than ordinary. Our finding is not necessarily inconsistent with Hong and Kacperczyk (2009), as they regressed equal weighted sin stocks against a value weighted market benchmark and economy wide investment style controls, which means that their significant positive alphas could have resulted from a clever portfolio weighting instead of any sin characteristics (i.e. the overproportionally weighted small sin stocks could have outperformed the underproportionally weighted large sin stocks).

This article examines the return characteristics of a portfolio of US 'vice stocks', firms that manufacture and sell socially irresponsible products such as alcohol, tobacco, gaming services and national defense. First of all, I construct a portfolio using the daily returns of 41 vice stocks over the period October 2007 to October 2013 and find the Jensen's alpha (CAPM), Fama-French Three Factor and Carhart Four-Factor results for the entire portfolio, the entire portfolio during bear and bull markets, and each vice industry individually. Full-period results show a positive, yet insignificant alpha for the entire portfolio and each vice industry. Bear market results show a positive and significant alpha for the entire portfolio as well as for all industry portfolios except the tobacco industry. Bull market results for the portfolio are less conclusive with a significant alpha only in the three and four-factor models.

Written by a practicing emergency physician, The White Coat Investor is a high-yield manual that specifically deals with the financial issues facing medical students, residents, physicians, dentists, and similar high-income professionals. Doctors are highly-educated and extensively trained at making difficult diagnoses and performing life saving procedures. However, they receive little to no training in business, personal finance, investing, insurance, taxes, estate planning, and asset protection. This book fills in the gaps and will teach you to use your high income to escape from your student loans, provide for your family, build wealth, and stop getting ripped off by unscrupulous financial professionals. Straight talk and clear explanations allow the book to be easily digested by a novice to the subject matter yet the book also contains advanced concepts specific to physicians you won't find in other financial books. This book will teach you how to: Graduate from medical school with as little debt as possible Escape from student loans within two to five years of residency graduation Purchase the right types and amounts of insurance Decide when to buy a house and how much to spend on it Learn to invest in a sensible, low-cost and effective manner with or without the assistance of an advisor Avoid investments which are designed to be sold, not bought Select advisors who give great service and advice at a fair price Become a millionaire within five to ten years of residency graduation Use a "Backdoor Roth IRA" and "Stealth IRA" to boost your retirement funds and decrease your taxes Protect your hard-won assets from professional and personal lawsuits Avoid estate taxes, avoid probate, and ensure your children and your money go where you want when you die Minimize your tax burden, keeping more of your hard-earned money Decide between an employee job and an independent contractor job Choose between sole proprietorship, Limited Liability Company, S Corporation, and C Corporation Take a look at the first pages of the book by clicking on the Look Inside feature Praise For The White Coat Investor "Much of my financial planning practice is helping doctors to correct mistakes that reading this book would have avoided in the first place." - Allan S. Roth, MBA, CPA, CFP(R), Author of How a Second Grader Beats Wall Street "Jim Dahle has done a lot of thinking about the peculiar financial problems facing physicians, and you, lucky reader, are about to reap the bounty of both his experience and his research." - William J. Bernstein, MD, Author of The Investor's Manifesto and seven other investing books "This book should be in every career counselor's office and delivered with every medical degree." - Rick Van Ness, Author of Common Sense Investing "The White Coat Investor provides an expert consult for your finances. I now feel confident I can be a millionaire at 40 without feeling like a jerk." - Joe Jones, DO "Jim Dahle has done for physician financial illiteracy what penicillin did for neurosyphilis." - Dennis Bethel, MD "An excellent practical personal finance guide for physicians in training and in practice from a non biased source we can actually trust." - Greg E Wilde, M.D Scroll up, click the buy button, and get started today!

John Neff is a life-long contrarian, proving time-and-again over the past three decades that bucking the system can pay off big. During his illustrious career as a money manager, Neff flew in the face of conventional wisdom by consistently passing over the big growth stocks of the moment, in favor of inexpensive, under performing ones-and he usually won. During his thirty-one years as portfolio manager for Vanguard's Windsor and Gemini II Funds, he beat the market twenty-two times, through every imaginable stock market climate, while posting a 57-fold increase in an initial stake. When Windsor closed its doors to new investors in 1986, it was the largest mutual fund in the United States. Now retired from mutual fund management, Neff is finally ready to share the investment strategies that earned him international recognition as the "investor's investor," and made him the one to whom other money managers come to manage their money. In John Neff on Investing, Neff delineates, for the first time, the principles of his phenomenally successful low p/e approach to investing, and he describes the strategies, techniques, and investment decisions that earned him a place alongside Warren Buffett and Peter Lynch in the pantheon of modern investment wizards. Packed with solid advice and guidance for anyone who aspires to using Neff's unique brand of value investing, John Neff on Investing offers invaluable lessons on using price-earnings ratios as a yardstick, to zeroing in on undervalued stocks, interpreting earnings histories and anticipating new market climates. A narrative of Neff's early days-My Road to Windsor-reveals the extraordinary mindset and humble circumstances that shaped his winning investment philosophy. By reproducing excerpts from his personal investment diaries, this book offers a unique opportunity to watch Neff in action over the years. A faithful, quarter-in-quarter-out chronicle of a life on Wall Street, the diaries provide unprecedented insights into the thinking behind some of his best (and worst) investment decisions, while tracing the evolution of his innovative investment style. The first book to fully reveal the long-heralded investment strategies of a Wall Street genius, John Neff on Investing is must reading for investors, brokers, traders, and bankers of every kind. JOHN NEFF, until his retirement in 1995, was Senior Vice President and Managing Partner of the Wellington Management Company, the Windsor Fund's investment advisor. S.L. MINTZ, is New York Bureau Chief of CFO Magazine, a publication of the Economist Group dedicated to the latest financial thinking and how it is being implemented in today's markets. His other books include Beyond Wall Street (Wiley, 1998) and Five Eminent Contrarians.

Social Value Investing presents a new way to approach some of society’s most difficult and intractable challenges. Although many of our world’s problems may seem too great and too complex to solve — inequality, climate change, affordable housing, corruption, healthcare, food insecurity — solutions to these challenges do exist, and will be found through new partnerships bringing together leaders from the public, private, and philanthropic sectors. In their new book, Howard W. Buffett and William B. Eimicke present a five-point management framework for developing and measuring the success of such partnerships. Inspired by value investing — one of history’s most successful investment paradigms — this framework provides tools to maximize collaborative efficiency and positive social impact, so that major public programs can deliver innovative, inclusive, and long-lasting solutions. It also offers practical insights for any private sector CEO, public sector administrator, or nonprofit manager hoping to build successful cross-sector collaborations. Social Value Investing tells the compelling stories of cross-sector partnerships from around the world — Central Park and the High Line in New York City, community-led economic development in Afghanistan, and improved public services in cities across Brazil. Drawing on lessons and observations from a broad selections of collaborations, this book combines real life stories with detailed analysis, resulting in a blueprint for effective, sustainable partnerships that serve the public interest. Readers also gain access to original, academic case material and professionally produced video documentaries for every major partnerships profiled — bringing to life the people and stories in a way that few other business or management books have done.