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The 2008 financial crisis planted the seeds for this book. I was at Bear Stearns watching everything going on around me in the markets and covering much of it as part of Bear's fixed income research team. My job let me range across different markets and talk to different investors in the US and abroad. It had been the case throughout my Wall Street career that advantages and disadvantages mattered in investing, and the crisis made it especially clear. When Bear collapsed, I decided to try to relay some of what I had learned to a new generation.

Glenn Hubbard, dean at the Columbia Business School, and Galen Hite, who organized the adjunct faculty for him, warmed to the idea of a course that would focus on ways that different institutional portfolios dealt with markets. They gave me the chance to design and offer the course, and I took it. I've been grateful ever since.

From that first semester, the students at Columbia Business School taught me as much as I taught them. There was no precedent for the course, much less a book, so I started doing the background work and developing the materials that evolved over the years into these pages. The students contributed excellent ideas, challenged me to hone my own, and taught me that a good lecture is as much a performance as anything else. I thank them for the education.

The clients and colleagues that explained the way different portfolios work, or just showed me by analyzing the same markets in such different ways for such different reasons, also deserve thanks. My list of contacts, which I've kept carefully since my first day on the Street, runs into the thousands. They all deserve some credit. The job of analyst has always seemed an extraordinarily good place to satisfy curiosity. Morgan Stanley, Bear Stearns, Deutsche Bank, and Amherst Pierpont have given me the opportunity. I've taken full advantage.

Some friends in the business deserve specific mention for carefully reading sections of this book and offering thoughtful comments. Richard Dewey, Albert Papa, Glenn Perillo, and Robert Thompson kindly read parts of the manuscript on tight deadline. Of course, any shortfalls or errors in this book are entirely mine.

Kevin Harreld, Michael Henton, and Richard Samson at John Wiley & Sons have encouraged me throughout the drafting of this manuscript and worked with me patiently to get all the details right for publication. To my partners at Wiley, thank you.

As for my family, I thank them for the time on nights and weekends I needed to work through the book, for their support and encouragement, and for the beautiful spot by the lake in New Jersey where much of the writing took place and where all good things happen.

Steven Abrahams

September 9, 2019