On Best Practices and Fallacies
Moneyball Book Review Analysis #2
On July 26, 2025, Forbes published a book review written by John Tamny of my book, The Moneyball Method. That review was also published on July 18, 2025, at RealClearMarkets.com. This brief essay will focus on a quote from the second paragraph of the Forbes review:
“It was while at these institutions that Shupe happened on the myriad fallacies associated with “best practices” on the matter of wealth management. Sensing customers were being misled by accepted wisdom, he turned his own “principles into practice.”
The first of those fallacies was mentioned in the previous article – to make investment decisions with no other purpose than “to make money.” Of course, earning a profit is a noble venture – and for entrepreneurs to make money for their shareholders is purposeful - it demands productive virtues that deliver value for customers. But for individual investors, it is best to define the goals and aspirations to be funded and when the money will be needed.
In Chapter Seven of The Moneyball Method, numerous fallacies were distilled and arranged into seven “best practices” that were rationalized by their own commonly accepted financial industry propositions. And each of those were preceded by premises that can only lead to contradictions.
The first of those are unreliable diversification tools for asset allocation. Next are the industry sector overweights that are common among investment strategists. Third is the reliance on money managers with superior track records.
Next is to maximize savings to overcome the diversification errors, sector weights that underperform and the risk associated with managers who go out of favor. Fifth is to fire the managers that underperform and replace them with more popular styles. Then rebalance the accounts to the original asset allocation that was determined by the false premises in the first place. And last is socially responsible investing to give purpose to the traditions of purpose-free investing.
In the next essay, I will expand on this with the reliable principles of Moneyball and this quote from the third paragraph of the book review:
It’s because as contrarian baseball mind Bill James explained it about baseball, “A great portion of the sport’s traditional knowledge is hokum.” Shupe feels the same way about money management. He sees an investment metaphor in Moneyball that can be applied to money, that “the natural world is orderly and knowable and you can choose to live in harmony with reality, or not.”
To learn more, please click the link below:
https://www.amazon.com/Moneyball-Method-Middle-Class-Manifesto-Objective/dp/1696009111/