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Hi Diehards: I have just finished reading Frank Armstrong's new book, "The Informed Investor". Frank is a contributor to this forum and attended Diehard I at my home. His book is filled with useful information and ideas. Here are a few: "It's important not to confuse investing with gambling. Gamblers should expect to lose. -- Long-term investors should expect to win." "The terrible truth is that financial management remains an art much more than a science." "Modern portfolio theory offers one of the strongest tools available to the rational investor." "Each brokerage house or investment manager wants the public to believe that somewhere in the back office is a genius who can make you rich." "The impact of asset allocation or investment policy swamps the other (investment) decisions." "Earnings and interest rate forecasts are so laughably bad that anyone with a 40% success rate can qualify as an expert." "The U.S. Census Department estimates that more than 1 million baby boomers will live to be more than 100 years old." "Wall Street isn't going out of its way to show you how to economize." "With the right commissions, incentives, and bonuses, Wall Street can get their brokers to sell anything." "If we don't establish the discipline to live on less than we make -- no amount of investment advice will help." "If you are investing for retirement, the time horizon is the rest of your life." "Market risk means that sometimes your equities will go down. It is only a function of when, and we can't know that. -- If you can't get used to the idea, don't go into the market." "The relationship between risk and reward is almost a physical law." "A very naive or simple strategy would be to buy the S&P 500 index for 60% (of your portfolio) and the long-term treasury bond for 40%. During the 5-year perod ending December 2000, this strategy would have outperformed 29 of the largest 30 pensions in the United States." "Risk and returns will be driven far more by asset allocation than stock selection or market timing." "Investors must understand that a superior portfolio will underperform from time to time. If they are prepared for this disconcerrting reality, they are less likely to find themselves abandoning their superior portfolio in favor of Wall Street's deal of the day." "My view is that, properly practiced, investing should be reasonably boring." "The new breed of college plan (529) is a major improvement over both the U.G.M.A and the prepaid tuition plans." "No-load mutual funds are about the most ideal building blocks for a globally diversified asset allocation plan you'll ever find. The combination of instant, broad diversification, liquidity, and low cost makes them the thinking investor's medium of choice." "Traditionally, we have thought of diversification, low cost, and the access to superb managers, as the chief advantages of mutual funds. The first two are certainly true." "Investors must consider risk, return, time horizon, and correlation before they can construct an appropriate investment allocation plan for themselves." "Within limits, and over longer periods, Modern Portfolio Theory can increase rates of return and reduce risk at the same time. "Rating services such as Morningstar's star awards or the 'Forbes' honor roll attest to the futility of applying past performance to tomorrow. -- If these two organizations can't make useful predictions with all their resources, how can the rest of us hope to?" "Style drift is the natural enemy of the asset allocation plan." "Do the right thing: In every asset class where they are available, index!" "Four of five funds will fail to meet or beat an appropriate index." "Remember that your investment plan doesn't have to be perfect to be great. Don't wait for it to be perfect. It never will be." "Mutual fund independent directors lack any discernible backbone and appear to be born with rubber stamps attached to their hands." "Wrap fee accounts may be great for the ego, but they're bad economics." "When it comes to annuities, just say no." "ETFs and index funds are so much alike that for many uses they are almost interchangeable." "Endless tinkering is unlikely to improve performance, and chasing last period's stellar achiever is a losing strategy." "How often should you rebalance? Most studies would indicate that about once a year is optimum." "My preferred solution to disappointing management performance has been to replace them with index funds." "Discipline is the key to success for the long-term investor. He or she must not fall into the trap of managing holdings by newspaper headline, sound bites, mindless prediction, gut feelings, or the last time period's results." "The primary cause of investor failure is the behavior of the investors themselves." "The 'buy and hold' strategy outperforms the average investor by more than three to one after ten years." "Another root cause of poor investor performance is self-delusion about risk tolerance. -- At Originally posted in thread: 19328

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