Nature of Investing: Resilient Investment Strategies Through Biomimicry

by Katherine Collins

We are all investors. We invest our time, our energy, our money. We invest every single day, as citizens, as consumers, as businesspeople. At its core, investing involves connection, exchange, and mutual benefit. Lately, however, the primary, beneficial function of investing has been overshadowed by ever-more mechanized iterations of finance. We have created funds of funds, securitizations of securitizations, and entire firms whose business is based on harvesting the advantage of microseconds of trading speed. The Nature of Investing calls for a transformation of the investment process from the roots up. Drawing on the author's twenty-plus years of leadership experience in top investment firms, the book connects real-world finance with the field of biomimicry. Citing real-life examples and discussing principles from the natural world, The Nature of Investing shows how we can create an investment framework that is different from the mechanized one currently employed. Readers will discover an approach that re-aligns investing with the world it was originally meant to serve. An approach that values resiliency over rigidity and elegant simplicity over synthetic complexity. This is the true nature of investing.

Genres: Finance, Business, Nonfiction, Economics

226 pages, Hardcover

First published April 12, 2014

About the author

Katherine Collins is Founder and CEO of Honeybee Capital and author of the forthcoming book, The Nature of Investing. Honeybee Capital is an independent research firm, dedicated to pollinating ideas in pursuit of optimal investment decision making. After a long and successful career as head of research and portfolio manager at Fidelity Management & Research Company, Katherine set out to re-integrate her investment philosophy with the broader world, traveling as a pilgrim and volunteer, earning her MTS degree at Harvard Divinity School, and studying biomimicry and the natural world as guides for investing in an integrated, regenerative way, beneficial to our communities and our planet. Her newest neighbors in Massachusetts are several thousand honeybees.

Reviews

[Jay French · Rating 1 out of 5]

I had an incredibly difficult time trying to stay attentive while listening to this book. It was not a long book, thankfully. It wasn’t an issue with the narrator. It was the content. It didn’t seem to really say anything. The book says it is about “Resilient Investment Strategies Through Biomimicry”. One example was evolution, and from evolution you are told to change your thoughts over time. Another example is to focus locally, like a plant would, by looking at local investments. Throughout, the book read like a new-age spiritual self help guide, more like Eckhart Tolle than Benjamin Graham.

There were quite a few things I didn’t appreciate in this book:

I found the “learnings” from looking at nature to be so basic as to not be useful in the real world. Instead of providing investing guidelines that I would expect given the book’s title, the author tries to provide more a philosophy of how you should decide to invest.

For every example the author came up with based on nature, I could think of the opposite in nature as well. When you base your arguments on analogies, you really need to care about the likely thoughts in the reader’s head trying to validate your suggestions.

The word “investments” in the title does not really mean “personal investing”. The author can be considered a Wall Street type, and I found many of the examples relate more to putting together something like a mutual fund or an estate plan rather than individual investing. By the end of the book, the author expands the meaning to include investments of time and thought. If you are a Wall Street type writing a book on investments, maybe people will make an assumption that they can use the advice for their investments. This book did not offer much of this advice.

In the end, what I think happened here is that the author, who had classwork in Biomimicry, started noticing she could use those kinds of examples to explain what she saw happening with her research team at Fidelity and in the economic world, and decided to extend these observations into a book. It’s like saying that cloud looks like a bear – I’m not sure you’re going to get much of an opportunity to make money based on that observation. In this case, the author took the concept beyond its limits. Nice try. I would definitely consider other books by the author given her writing style and her work experience, but they would have to be on finance and not new age topics.

[Gary Cohen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very thought provoking book. I am not an investment professional so my main interest in this book was not as much in the details of the investment strategies but more so in the use of nature and evolution as a model given my interest in complexity science and my work trying to build resilient organizations.

There are many notes that I took from this book related to variability, adaptability, simplicity, feedback, the difference between being efficient and effective and the difference between maximizing and optimizing.

I enjoyed reading this book. It made me think and reflect quite a bit.

[Maggie Liu · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm q biologist and finance is my hobby but this really didn't add any knowledge. I am actually interested at social investing and environmental economy but I feel this didn't excute on a factual level. It spent too much time trying to make a simile between biology and investing. Over all not consise enough writing style.

[Meghan Bundrock · Rating 3 out of 5]

Listened on Hoopla. Interesting to hear how biomimicry can be applied to something as abstract as investing practices. Unless you're an avid trader or investor, not super useful. Also, would appreciate a woman voice vs a man's, since a woman wrote the book!

[Lorelí Pulido · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ciertos comentarios me parecieron interesantes, en parte repite un poco las bases de Biomímesis mencionadas ya por Janine Banyus.

Me quedo con la frase “Constant pollination of new ideas”.

[Bart · Rating 4 out of 5]

Better than expected if entirely theoretical with a bit of a coaching-homework-assignment feel to it

[Helfren · Rating 3 out of 5]

The nature of Investing -Resilient Investment Strategies really outlies the mundane part of investment and tries to over-explain everything. However, it makes the content very stale and makes us reader-uninterested.

A very neutral read.

[RT · Rating 4 out of 5]

Clear, concise descriptions about the integration of bio mimicry to the investing world. Real world, applicable examples. The narration was excellent. I did not give this five stars because at times the author would go on about scientific details and then delve into the relationship with investing, which is good, but there was too much information regarding that and at times I lost track of where it was heading. If i read this instead of listened to the audio book, i might have given it five stars. Reading is just so much more different than listening.

[Charles Szpinda · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most influental books of there about investing. Great author and great read!