From Stock Market Maestros: The winning habits, strategies, and mindsets of the world’s best investors, to be published by Harriman House in March 2026 (Pre-order now).
By Lee Freeman-Shor
Lee Freeman-Shor is the author of the international bestseller, The Art of Execution: How the world’s best investors get it wrong and still make millions, named by Investing By The Books as one of the “Top 20 Investment Books Ever.” Before becoming a writer, the Citywire 1000 report recognized Lee as one of the world’s top fund managers. His flagship fund received a Gold rating from S&P Capital IQ and the top (AAA) rating by Citywire.
The question The Art of Execution sought to answer was “How can great investors be wrong most of the time and still make money?” In Stock Market Maestros, the upcoming book I co-wrote with Essentia Founder and CEO Clare Flynn Levy, the question we seek to answer is: “When a great investor is in a losing or winning situation, how do they determine whether to stay or sell?”
In the book we speak to twelve extraordinarily skilled portfolio managers – we call them Maestros. In this excerpt, I lay out what differentiates them in a crowded field.
In Stock Market Maestros, we profile twelve investors whose extraordinary skill differentiates them in a crowded field. Pre-order now.
Wizards and Maestros
There are Stock Market Wizards … and then there are Stock Market Maestros.
In my mind, wizards are exceptionally skilled traders who make money by speculating on the movements of stocks, currencies, commodities, bonds and crypto currencies. They are typically short-term oriented, and they aren’t necessarily focused on corporate fundamentals.
Maestros, on the other hand, are investors, not traders. They invest based on fundamentals, with reference to valuation and sometimes to technical analysis. They hold their positions for months and years, not hours or days. Maestros are playing a longer game. And they’re doing it on behalf of ordinary investors like you and me, using the same public equities the rest of us use to build our portfolios.
Traders must be skilled at execution to stay in the game – they don’t have time to hang about, waiting for an idea to come good. Investors, on the other hand, often assume that all they really need to get right is the stock pick; that timing and sizing decisions are less important.
Maestros know that assumption is wrong. They get exceptional performance results not by always picking the right stocks – indeed, they may be wrong more often than they are right – but by developing and implementing rules around timing and sizing that results in winning positions that win big and losing positions that lose small.
In this book, you will meet twelve of the world’s most skilled investors in the stock markets and hear first-hand how they do it. They include legendary hedge fund managers and lesser-known mutual fund and active ETF managers. They hail from all around the globe and manage a wide array of strategies for investors across North America, Europe and Asia. Some of our Maestros focus on small cap stocks, where execution can be significantly more difficult due to restricted liquidity and paucity of information, while others invest across the market cap spectrum.
What they have in common is that all twelve Stock Market Maestros are not just good stock pickers – they are masters of execution par excellence.
The Lesson from The Art of Execution
My findings in Execution showed that it was how an investor behaved after they had invested in an idea that determined their success or failure.
How they reacted to winning and losing mattered more than the stocks they picked to invest in.
And yet, even today, people obsess about stock ideas, unaware that whether they make money has less to do with the stock itself, and everything to do with how they behave once they’re in it.
“You are what you do when it counts.”
– From “Armor” by John Steakley
“It is in the moments of decision that your destiny is shaped.”
– Anthony Robbins
Stock Market Maestros: The winning habits, strategies, and mindsets of the world’s best investors is published by Harriman House and goes on sale in March 2026. Reserve your copy now!
About Essentia Analytics
Essentia Analytics is the leading provider of behavioral data analytics services to professional investors and allocators of capital. Led by a team of experts in investment management, technology and behavioral science, Essentia combines next-generation decision attribution analytics technology with human coaching to help both equity fund managers and allocators identify investment skill and bias — and capture performance that was previously being lost to decision-making deficiencies.
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