In 2006, Robert Isbitts, the chief investment officer of Emerald Asset Advisors in Weston, Fla., self-published his first book, "Wall Street's Bull and How to Bear It."
He says the book was intended to help investors and their advisers overcome the hurdles created by financial markets and financial salespeople.
"It wasn't common at the time to warn people about the things I warned them about," Isbitts says. "But I have a relentless, burning desire to reeducate the adviser population, and their clients through them."
When Isbitts began to write his second book, he targeted 2011 as the year to publish.
And then 2008 happened. So he went to work and completed his second book, "The Flexible Investing Playbook," published by Wiley this year.
Isbitts says he "had to employ that same relentless, burning desire to set the record straight and define the asset allocation strategy."
His new book in many ways updates the story of "Wall Street's Bull and How to Bear It" and helps readers identify various issues that may previously have been obscure to them.
"I felt like there was demand from the first book that was untapped," Isbitts says.
"It was important for me to do a really kind of tight, more comprehensive job in the second book because the stakes were higher after 2008."
In the book, Isbitts takes the traditional 60/40 approach to investing (in which 60% of a portfolio is invested in stocks and up to 40% in bonds) and gives it a makeover.
He supports a tactical approach, focusing on 10% market moves, with goals of realizing at least 6% in up markets and doing no worse than losing 4% in a down market.
Isbitts lays out three strategies, using hybrid, concentrated equity and global-cycle models.
The hybrid model aims to "produce a consistent stream of absolute returns with low market correlation over a minimum rolling three-year" period.
The concentrated equity strategy is meant to "take moderate risk, tag along with up markets, play good defense in down markets and, by that combination, succeed over a period of three to five years."
Global-cycle investing aims to "carefully select active equity fund managers who are focused on the specific secular themes chosen" with a time horizon of five to 10 years.
For Isbitts, the idea is to get clients to think about asset allocation as a means of delivering retirement income.
"Wall Street did a very good job in the '80s and early '90s educating on asset allocation," he said.
"Something went wrong, probably in the mid-'90s. Investing went from something people did for retirement to something that they did for sport.
"It became short-attention-span theater."
Isbitts said that his book is for advisers and their clients who have "reached or approached the tipping point in their asset allocation."
These are advisers who are realizing that a lot of what they learned and educated their clients about on asset allocation was wrong, he added.
Isbitts argued that, of the last 11 decades, only three had sustainable stock market upside for the duration of the period: the 1950s, '80s and '90s.
"The problem is, baby boomers grew up as investors in the '80s and '90s," Isbitts said.
"It's sort of like growing up as a privileged child and then realizing that [life] was probably not going to be quite as sugarcoated as when you were growing up. It's a real shock," he said.
For readers on a tight schedule, Isbitts said, the most important chapters might be Four, "Identifying the Issues and the Enemy," and Six, "Keys to Successful Asset Allocation."
The former "makes people think about self-inflicted wounds," and the latter is "the prescription after you come up with the diagnosis," he said.
