An example of the brainwashing I was referring to earlier. Here is Ben Stein, a well known guy, writing in today's NY Times. This is a portion of it. I can't get truly angry at this stuff, but part of me wants to give him a giant kick in the rear end for polluting the world with such nonsense. What I have been doing repeatedly goes completely against the grain of this plain vanilla advice mongering. But know one thing: The more people who buy into this trash, the more wide open it leaves the field for the astute stock picker and microcap investor. If everyone who was already brainwashed had woken up one day and started buying DPDW months ago most of us would never have had the opportunity to own this stock as cheap as we do. Here's the excerpt:
AVOID INDIVIDUAL STOCKS The data on this is as clear as a bell, and has been compiled by high-end thinkers ranging from Nobel laureates to the best friend the ordinary investor has ever had, John C. Bogle of Vanguard. Basically, you and I cannot pick stocks, except for Berkshire Hathaway. I was recently on a panel with the stock guru Ray Lucia, who offered overwhelming data about how impossible it was to pick stocks, trade in and out of them and fare as well as the market. His data was terrifying.
The people on Wall Street do many questionable things. They reward themselves extremely well. But they have, in the last couple of decades, made it possible for almost anyone to get good results in stocks: buying very broad-based mutual funds, index funds, exchange-traded funds and (with an eye on fees) variable annuities and holding them for a long time. The evidence that this form of investment does better over long periods than trying to pick stocks is simply staggering.
Yes, maybe some gurus at a hedge fund can do it for a while. Maybe your cousin claims that he has done it. Don’t try to do it yourself.
