"Investing well depends on competitive advantage. Some portfolios are simply in a better position to generate returns for reasons that have nothing to do with their managers. The best investors know their relative strengths and weaknesses and try to anticipate circumstances where they might earn returns unavailable to other investors. Although the daily work of most investors revolves around building and using competitive advantage, most of the written work on investing barely reflects this. Mutual funds and hedge funds, banks and insurers, and nearly every other type of portfolio try to get the upper hand. Most work on investing tends to focus either on formal treatments that abstract away from the institutional details of the markets or on nuts-and-bolts advice for practitioners with little in between. This book builds a bridge from the actual work of most institutional portfolio managers to the formal literature on investing"