New York
JOEL Greenblatt had been a successful investor for two decades before his best-selling The Little Book That Beats the Market was published in 2005. But the hedge fund niche he first pursued - "special situations" like spin-offs and other corporate restructurings - was modest in scale, and the most he had managed directly for outside investors was US$500 million.
The Little Book offered what Mr Greenblatt described jokingly as a "magic formula" to pick stocks based on two numerical "value" metrics that, he said, produced returns that beat the market on paper by more than 10 percentage points annually from 1988 to 2004.
When readers clamoured for ways to follow the "magic formula" strategy...
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