Sublime

Without ever tapping outside capital, Jane Street had gone from a few traders with a few million dollars, in 1999, to roughly two hundred traders working with several billion dollars, in 2014. One big reason was ETFs, whose global value had grown from less than $100 billion to $2.2 trillion (on its way to more than $10 trillion in 2022).

Go back to my 20s and at any given point I held something like 25 individual stocks. I don’t know how I did as a stock picker. Did I beat the market? I’m not sure. Like most who try, I didn’t keep a good score. Either way, I’ve shifted my views and now every stock we own is a low-cost index fund.

Contrarian that I am, the format for this book is intentionally unorthodox as books on investing go these days. It is not about I lail Mary passes; it's about grinding out gains quarter after quarter, year after year. My kind of investing rests on three elements: character, goals, and experience.

For the unprepared, meeting John Neff can be a "disaster." Those who meet Neff's standards appreciate thatJohn answers his own phone ("Neff!"), and he always gives as good as he gets, or better, in both information and insight. Neff's rigorous discipline in "doing his homework" has one important consequence: His portfolio's turnover and the cost of

In 2014, Forbes ranked him as the 134th richest American, at $3.8 billion. One of his hires was Jeff Bezos, who, while researching business opportunities in 1994 for Shaw, got the idea for an online bookstore and left to start a company called Amazon.com. At $30 billion in 2014, Bezos was the fifteenth richest American.