Book Description

More than just another guide to making a quick dollar on the stock market or beating the S&P 500, The Speculator's Mosaic is a speculative investment book that details the hard-earned wisdom accumulated during five decades of portfolio management. Culled from a lifetime of successes - and failures - the book offers a detailed suite of tricks and strategies that have given author Bob Leppo an edge in stock market investing, commodity futures, and the wild world of venture capital. Yes, the book is about making money - lots of it. But The Speculator's Mosaic is about more than that. It's about the journey. It's about the excitement, frustration, rapture, and disappointment of pure speculation. It's about booms and busts, fortunate breaks and missed opportunities. Inspirational in tone, it's a love song to speculation, replete with triumph, heartbreak, anguish, and redemption. Part memoir, part tale of discovery and rebirth, The Speculator's Mosaic is mostly a friendly, no-nonsense guide to navigating the ups and downs - financial, emotional, and otherwise - of a career in speculative investment. Detailing a half century of hits and misses, often with brutal honesty, the book relays lessons learned from both the crucible of failure and the elation of success. There are plenty of books on stock picking, on shorting commodity futures, on investment basics, on obtaining venture capital money. What makes The Speculator's Mosaic different is that beyond stocks and commodities, it gives the reader a real-world perspective on what it's like on the VC's side of the table, picking the products and people worth betting heavily on. In the book, author Robert Leppo walks the reader through real life failures and successes in portfolio management, outlining investing basics as well as strategies and tools for investing in people who create valuable products or services. This includes specific tips to help readers position themselves as a positive counterpoint to the negative image of today's mainstream VC. With 50 years of speculative investment experience, even novice speculators stand a good chance to strike it rich - and learn a thing or two about themselves in the process. Robert Leppo started as a kid flush with $100 dollars of poker winnings. He finished with a fortune. The Speculator's Mosaic tells the story of how.