Book excerpt: This book teaches you how to time the market to impact long-term returns, for a bountiful investing cycle! It is an effort to marry the discipline of investing, economics and behavioural finance to the cycles in which businesses operate. The author has tried to mine his years of experience in investment banking and investing to identify new frameworks that can be of help to both amateur and professional investors. It is also an effort to capture the history of Indian capital markets and economy through an investor’s lens. Most of the available literature around value investing has been US centric, and the value investing fraternity in India is now definitely in need of both – a new language and new tools – to move ahead in a world where neither information flow nor capital appear to be scarce. Clearly, some of the tools of old-fashioned value investing are becoming archaic and increasingly difficult to apply in today’s context. The Polycycle Investor offers an alternate school of thought on value investing, which looks to fill-in the gap, and helps elucidate the updated tools for this through examples from the Indian markets’ perspective. The book discusses both – capital allocation strategies and stock picking strategies – which are tried and tested by the author himself, and have the ability to significantly improve portfolio returns over decades of investing. While advocating long-term investing, this book also argues in favour of a nimble and more active approach towards portfolio rebalancing, capital allocation and sector allocation.