The Making of a Permabear: The Perils of Long-term Investing in a Short-term World

When Jeremy Grantham entered the investment business in the 1960s, he brought the thrifty Quaker values and Yorkshire independence he had been raised with. While other money managers were focused on blue chip stocks, he studied stock market history and constructed by hand the first indices for small—cap and value stocks. Charting their ebb and flow, he could see clearly the powerful force that would become central to his investment philosophy: mean reversion, “the heartbreaking principle that good times always revert back to more boring, more ordinary times.”

In the early 1970s Grantham was a pioneer of index investing. Soon after, he co—founded GMO and spent the firm’s early earnings on a hard drive the size of an industrial washing machine, becoming the first firm to use a computer for investment analysis. This quantitative style went on to take over the industry. In the late 1990s Grantham acquired notoriety as a “permabear” for refusing to buy into the dotcom mania. Clients left in droves—one called him “dangerously persuasive and totally wrong”—but he was vindicated when the bubble burst in 2000. Yet while his wealth grew, so did his alarm at the disastrous consequences of short—term thinking not just for investors but for the very future of the planet, and he has directed nearly all his wealth to environmental protection.

Written with his former colleague, the bestselling financial historian Edward Chancellor, The Making of a Permabear is replete with investment insights and provides a compellingly candid and witty insider’s tour of the booms and busts of the past half century.