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Alirio Zavarce's one-man show on the nature of something he's termed "rational madness" begins in an airport. He's just flown back to Australia with a prop suitcase, and as the story reaches fever pitch, with the federal police brandishing machine guns and a gaggle of customs officials staring him down suspiciously, he stops the show. He's troubled. There's a divide between Zavarce the man and Zavarce the actor. Maybe that's the wrong place to begin. Things carry on, but it's not the last time he'll stop the show. Loco is peppered with Zavarce's asides, and the whole thing proceeds in kooky fits and starts. Jonathon Oxlade's enchanting set - a towering wall of cardboard boxes - becomes a playground. Sections fall down, some of them contain secrets, and more than a few become the canvas for Chris More's projection design. Zavarce's marriage and the twin towers of the World Trade Centre collapsed on the same day, and this is where his "rational madness" began. Everyone's a little bit loco, and sometimes we have to give in to it in order to get through. He's a beguiling, fascinating performer who's at his best engaging directly with the audience. Sasha Zahra's direction is solid, but there's a gap between the darkness and the light in these stories. These semi-autobiographical tales are told mostly in big print, and the net effect is beautifully polished, but fundamentally shallow. Like The Rabble's Room of Regret last year, this show features a plate of human faeces. But it's there to do more than just shock: it's glad wrapped, and it's a prop in a didactic little bit about the value of things.

How the Media Influences Your Investment Decisions for Better or Worse by Joshua M. Brown and Jeff Macke (McGraw-Hill, 2014) is a book by financial pundits about financial pundits. It alternates between reflections on the financial media (I assume written by Josh Brown) and interviews conducted by Jeff Macke. The interviewees are Jim Rogers, Ben Stein, Karen Finerman, Henry Blodget, Herb Greenberg, James Altucher, Barry Ritholtz, and Jim Cramer. Since both authors are members of the financial media (Brown is author of The Reform Broker blog and a regular contributor to CNBC, Macke is the host of Breakout on Yahoo Finance), the reader can't expect to be told: "just turn off the news." Instead, the authors try to explain which pundits may be worth listening to and which ones are just noise, or worse. For investors who are not intrinsically skeptical and who have no idea of how to separate the wheat from the chaff, the authors offer a few good pointers. For the rest of us-hardened, cynical folk that we are, the interviews offer some good tidbits. The book has a strange subtext, along the lines of "I once was lost but now I'm found." Jeff Macke recounts his career-killing "Car People" episode on the now defunct evening program CNBC Reports and his subsequent emotional descent and recovery. And he interviews three insiders who to a greater or lesser degree faced their own professional crises: Henry Blodget, banned from the securities industry but now the editor and CEO of Business Insider; Jim Cramer, who took a drubbing on Jon Stewart's The Daily Show; and James Altucher, who seems to specialize in failing and bouncing back-and writing about it. Whom do I personally consider worth listening to? First, those who readily admit they don't know the answer. Bob Shiller comes to mind here. Second, those who move markets, such as David Tepper. And third, those who are both

The Theory and Practice of Rational Investing, Harry M. Markowitz worries about a "great confusion" that reigns in finance - namely, "the confusion between necessary and sufficient conditions for the use of mean-variance analysis." This is a serious matter. Mean-variance analysis has been the cornerstone of portfolio construction since Markowitz's seminal 1952 article. Meanwhile, academics and practitioners have been in constant search of the next holy grail that will guide the allocation of capital. Consider the endless stream of articles proposing enhancements to mean-variance analysis or substitutes for it. Substantial bodies of literature discuss optimizers that incorporate higher moments or attempt to replace variance with alternative risk measures. Another takes account of investors' so-called irrational tendencies. I recall a former colleague saying, "Let's not re-implement Harry Markowitz's PhD thesis for the millionth time. We can do better." But we have not. What are the objections to mean-variance analysis, and are they well grounded? Markowitz has devoted Risk-Return Analysis to these questions, concluding that mean-variance analysis is central to finance for good reason. This book proceeds in unhurried steps from a set of incontrovertible premises to the conclusion that mean-variance analysis is the best tool available for addressing a wide range of portfolio-construction problems.