Capital Account relates the story of the world's greatest investment bubble from the perspective of professional investors. The book, comprised of selected reports from Marathon Asset Management, a successful global investment firm, explains how shareholder value the notion that companies should be run in the interests of their shareholders became corrupted in this era of frenzied finance. Senior managers, succumbing to the lure of stock option fortunes, took to manipulating their company's earnings. Professional investors, interested only in maintaining their investment performance over the next quarter, were willing abettors. The croupiers' of Wall Street, also know as investment bankers, whipped up the euphoria and peddled to investors superficially plausible stories, MacGuffins', in order to generate huge fees for themselves. As a result, by the turn of the century almost the entire investment community had become fixated with chasing short-term profits at the expense of long-term returns for clients. By the end of 2002 this cynical game had ended in investment disaster the world's stock markets having produced more than $15 trillion of losses since their peak. Yet to a large extent, the outcome was predictable to those investors who had retained a disciplined approach to investment analysis throughout the bull market. This book introduces the capital cycle' approach to investment an approach that brings together ideas from the fields of behavioral finance, economic theory and business analysis. Capital cycle analysis - based on the apparently simple insight that investor euphoria leads to excessive investment in the real world and subsequent poor returns for shareholders - enabled Marathon to identify at an early stage the inevitable collapse of the technology and telecoms bubble.

资本账户从专业投资者的角度讲述了世界上最大的投资泡沫的故事。这本书包括成功的全球投资公司Marathon Asset Management的精选报告，解释了在当今金融狂热的时代，股东如何看重公司应为股东利益而经营的观念。高级管理人员屈服于股票期权的诱惑，开始操纵公司的收入。只对维持下一季度的投资表现感兴趣的专业投资者乐于助教。华尔街的副手们，也被称为投资银行家，掀起了狂喜，并向表面上看似真实的故事（MacGuffins）兜售给投资者，以期为自己产生巨额费用。结果，到本世纪之交，几乎整个投资界都为追求短期利润而束手无策，而以牺牲客户的长期回报为代价。到2002年底，这种玩世不恭的游戏因投资灾难而告终，自股票市场达到顶峰以来，全球股票市场已造成超过15万亿美元的损失。然而，在很大程度上，对于那些在整个牛市中都保持了严格的投资分析方法的投资者而言，结果是可以预见的。本书介绍了资本周期的投资方法，该方法汇集了行为金融，经济理论和业务分析领域的思想。资本周期分析-基于表面上的简单见解，即投资者的兴高采烈导致对现实世界的过度投资以及随后股东的不佳回报-使马拉松能够在早期阶段就确定技术和电信泡沫不可避免的崩溃。