From Ron Dembo, advisor to leading banks and hedge funds, and Daniel Stoffman, co-author of the revolutionary bestseller Boom, Bust and Echo, Upside, Downside is an accessible guide to the biggest danger facing investors in an increasingly uncertain world: financial risk. As a generation of investors knows, financial markets are vulnerable to events – from terrorist attacks to epidemics – that are guaranteed to occur, yet impossible to predict. As markets become more complex and intertwined, investors feel increasingly unsure: how can you safeguard your financial prospects when you can’t know what the future will look like? Upside, Downside is a toolbox to protect yourself from financial risk. Co-authored by a leading financial journalist and a pioneer in the field of risk management who advises the world’s major banks, it gives investors access for the first time to the most advanced risk management strategies available, distilled into three simple rules for managing risk. These rules – Knowing What You Own, Using Multiple Scenarios, and Anticipating Regret – will allow you to take control of your financial future. You can’t banish all the dangers of the world, but Upside, Downside will give you the skills to manage them.

Upside, Downside: Simple Rules of Risk Management for the Smart Investor

Business & Money

Dembo, Ron

Stoffman, Daniel

Insurance

Doubleday, Canada

Book by Foot, David K., Stoffman, Daniel

Boom Bust & Echo: Profiting from the Demographic Shift in the 21st Century

Foot, David K.

MacFarlane, Walter & Ross

Demographics - the study of human populations - are a powerful, but often underused, method for understanding the past and predicting the future. In Boom, Bust &amp; Echo 2000: Profiting from the Demographic Shift in the New Millennium, economist David Foot and journalist Daniel Stoffman take a look at the importance of demographics. They try to predict what baby boomers, "baby busters", the "echo generation", and other groups in the coming years can expect. This fully-revised edition of the highly successful Boom, Bust &amp;Echo contains the most recent information on demographic trends in Canada and how they can affect your future. 
Demographics play a critical role in the nation's economy and social life, and they affect every one of us as individuals. The more we understand demographic realities, the better prepared we will be to cope with them - and to turn them to our advantage. 
In Canada, the aging of those born between 1947 and 1966 - the baby boom generation - has changed the economy, driven housing and other markets, and transformed social mores and lifestyles. As the boomers enter mid-life, as the "baby-busters" behind them come of age, and as the "echo generation," the children of the boomers, reaches maturity, how will the country change? Where will Canadians choose to live? What are the prospects for employment? Which investments will be favoured? What lies ahead for Canada's health care and education systems? 
Everyone who plans for the future - whether it be for a large corporation, a retail store, a school system, a nonprofit enterprise, or for personal well-being - needs effective forecasting tools. Boom, Bust &amp; Echo 2000 goes beyond the traditional methods of focus groups and opinion surveys to an analysis of statistical facts. Here is an original and indispensable work filled with arresting insights, provocative assertions, and practical answers.

Boom Bust & Echo 2000: Profiting from the Demographic Shift in the New Millennium

Marketing & Sales

Finalist for the National Post Business Book Award An entertaining dissection of a huge and important but almost invisible industry. Daniel Stoffman became intrigued by the mutual fund industry while writing Boom Bust &amp; Echo with David K. Foot. The stock markets, driven by baby boomers saving for their retirement, were enjoying an extended bull run. Mutual funds – which few people had even heard of in the 1960s – were becoming the investment vehicle of choice for Canadians. Stoffman’s first surprise was that the fund companies – Fidelity and Altamira, Investors Group and Trimark, AIC and Mackenzie – see themselves not as financial institutions but as manufacturers of products. These products are marketed to consumers, just like soft drinks or automobiles or razor blades. The most successful companies aren’t those that provide the best returns on clients’ investments, they’re the ones that most effectively market their products. The industry has done a fine job of keeping Canadians ignorant of its workings, Stoffman discovered, and with good reason. Most investors are unaware of the fees they pay to own mutual funds. Few realize that financial planners are remunerated by the fund companies into which they put their clients’ money, which means their advice may not be objective. And not many understand that mutual fund companies can thrive even when they deliver mediocre performance. When investors buy a managed fund, they pay for professional stock-picking. But index funds – mutual funds made up of exactly the same stocks as, say, the TSE 300 index – consistently outperform actively managed funds. Why, then, don’t savvy investors opt for the lower fees of index funds? It’s happening in the United States, says Stoffman, and Canada won’t be far behind. As baby boomers retire and find themselves with the time to manage their own investments, they’re becoming more knowledgeable, more discerning, and more reluctant to pay the sometimes exorbitant fees charged by the fund companies. All of this points to increasing consolidation among the mutual fund companies, Stoffman believes, and growing public pressure to reform the industry.

The Money Machine

Investing

September 11, 2001, marked the end of innocence for Canada’s ill-conceived, poorly run, and highly partisan immigration and refugee programs. In a tightly argued book sure to inspire controversy, Daniel Stoffman debunks the myths surrounding Canadian immigration and offers well-founded suggestions for change. A Chinese fishing boat is intercepted off the British Columbia coast. The 123 people on board, seeking to enter Canada illegally, are arrested, then given taxpayers’ money and legal representation. They apply for refugee status. Pending their hearings, they disappear. Welcome to Canada. An Algerian man is searched disembarking from a ferry from Victoria, B.C., to Port Angeles, Wash. His rental car turns out to contain explosives he plans to use to blow up the Los Angeles airport. The man turns out to be an al-Qaeda-trained terrorist bearing a Canadian passport in a false name. The terrorism of September 11, 2001, turned an intense spotlight on Canada’s lax immigration and refugee programs. “The longest undefended border in the world” became, for the United States, a pressing security concern, and for good reason. Canada is the most immigrant-friendly country in the world, accepting (on a per capita basis) twice as many immigrants as the next most welcoming nation, many of them people about whom little is known. Canada’s immigration program used to be run in the national interest. Now it belongs to those who benefit from it, either politically (most newcomers vote Liberal, so the Liberals use immigration to increase support) or economically (a whole industry has grown up around immigration, refugee, and multicultural issues). Who Gets In shows how this came about, explains why it’s contrary to the national interest, and suggests ways to fix the mess. Daniel Stoffman points out that our immigration policy is based on two false premises: that immigration provides substantial economic benefits and that we need a huge influx of younger people to offset the aging of our population. Both assumptions he persuasively refutes. Add political correctness, diversity masquerading as multiculturalism, and a voting public that has not yet made immigration an election issue, and presto: you have the most generous, insecure, and muddled immigration system in the world. Like most Canadians, Stoffman heartily supports responsible immigration and a compassionate refugee program. We have neither, he argues, and it’s time for Canadians to demand of their leaders that this most important program be rescued from political partisanship and returned to the foundations of national interest and humanitarianism on which it was built.

Who Gets In: What's wrong with Canada's immigration program - and how to fix it

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

Nelvana Story, The: Thirty Animated Years

Kids Can Press

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