Ancient Chinese philosophy meets venerable Austrian economics in a hedge fund manager's modern-day approach to investing. As today's preeminent doomsday investor Mark Spitznagel describes his Daoist and roundabout investment approach, one gains by losing and loses by gaining. Foreword Introduction Chapter One: The Daoist Sage Klipp’s Paradox The Old Master The Soft and Weak Vanquish the Hard and Strong Into the Pit The Privileges of a Trader Robinson Crusoe in the Bond Pit Fishing in ‘McElligot’s Pool’ Enter the Austrians: A von Karajan Moment A State of Rest Guiding into emptiness... Moving On The Wisdom of the Sages Chapter Two: The Forest in the Pinecone The Roundabout and the Logic of Growth The Forest and the Tree The Slow Seedling Wildfire and Resource Reallocation The Conifer Effect A Logic of Growth Chapter Three: Shi The Intertemporal Strategy The Dao of Sun Wu Shi and the Crossbow Li - The Direct Path Shi and Li at the Weiqi Board A Common Thread, from East to West An Attack of Misunderstanding On War - An Indirect Strategy Shi, Ziel, Mittel, und Zweck Chapter Four: The Seen and the Foreseen The Roots of the Austrian Tradition That Which Must Be Foreseen At the Viennese Crossroads between East and West The Teleology of Baer’s Butterfly Menger Establishes the Austrian School Tutor to the Prince Methodenstreit Österreichische Schule Chapter Five: Umweg The Roundabout Path of the Unternehmer Postulating the “Positive” Produktionsumweg Böhm-Bawerk, the Bourgeois Marx Faustmann’s Forest Economy Rings of Capital Henry Ford: The Roundabout Unternehmer The Roundabout of Life Chapter Six: Time Preference Overcoming That Humanness about Us “Radical” Böhm-Bawerk and the Psychology of Time Preference The Curious Case of Phineas Gage The Shi and Li Brain The Subjectivity of Time The Tradeoff of an Addict No Zeal for Ziel on Wall Street Adapting to the Intertemporal Chapter Seven: “The Market Is a Process” The Man Who Predicted the Great Depression Fleeing the Nazis Human Action Unternehmer in the Land of the Nibelungen Genuine Change Is Afoot in Nibelungenland—A Market-Induced Drop in Interest Rates Distortion Comes to Nibelungenland—The Central Bank Lowers Rates Time Inconsistency and the Term Structure The Day of Reckoning Comes to Nibelungenland The Austrian View The Market Process Prevails Chapter Eight: Homeostasis Seeking Balance in the Midst of Distortion The Teleology of the Market The Yellowstone Effect Lessons from the Distorted Forest Market Cybernetics How Things ‘Go Right’ Spontaneous Order Distortion The Sand Pile Effect Distortion’s Message: ‘Do Nothing’ The Shi of Capital Chapter Nine: Austrian Investing I: The Eagle and the Swan Exploiting Distortion By Way of the Roundabout Homeostasis en force Enter the Distortion An Initial Misesian Investment Strategy The Eagle and the Swan The Ziel and the Zweck : “Tail” Hedging Case Study: Prototypical Tail Hedging The Roundabout Investor Chapter Ten: Austrian Investing II: Siegfried Exploiting False Prices By Way of the Roundabout Case Study: Buying the Siegfrieds Value Investing, Austrian Investing’s Estranged Offspring A Zweck Attained Epilogue Notes Acknowledgments About the Author Index