William Bernstein

A reasonably sound place to start for investing as an individual is the Bogleheads wiki: https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Main_Page The general Bogleheads approach isn't to try to estimate value of individual stocks or sectors of the economy, basic idea is passive investment: buy & hold index funds to get diversified exposure to market returns, then minimise costs by avoiding funds with high management fees. Bernstein's http://www.efficientfrontier.com/ is good reading, from perspective of individual investor. If on the other hand you want to learn about how to estimate value of companies (this will probably will not have a good return on time or money invested for an individual compared to low effort passive investment approach) one place to start reading is http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/ & http://aswathdamodaran.blogspot.com/

I read an amazing book about portfolio allocation a few years back and reallocated my holdings. The thing that impressed me was a historical analysis which showed that, as long as you split your fixed income and equities, you would do quite well. The interesting thing was that you could split them sub-optimially and the whole thing would do well. Getting the proportion exactly right would get you a slightly better return, but much less than I expected. When the market is charging ahead, it might seem that holding bonds/fixed income might be a waste, but it's really just a form of insurance. Another interesting thing I learned was that holding inversely correlated things led to higher returns and less volatility. So an all-equity portfolio would generally have a slightly smaller return than one with even 5 or 10% fixed income. Anyways, the book was by a guy named William Bernstein, and his (very dated looking) site is at http://www.efficientfrontier.com/. His book is called the Intelligent Asset Allocator. The first 2 chapters are on the author's site. The book can be ordered from Amazon at: https://www.amazon.com/product-reviews/0071362363/ref=cm_cr_dp_syn_foo…

This book is an excellent start and the author has made it available for free as a PDF (you can also get it on Amazon) http://efficientfrontier.com/ef/0adhoc/ifyoucan.pdf It lays out an effective retirement strategy in the first paragraph or so, and spends the rest of the book explaining it. Short and easy read. The strategy has to be adapted somewhat for non-Americans - if you're Canadian, the adaptations can be found at https://canadiancouchpotato.com/. Like I said, it's a start, but it also recommends a lot of good and trustworthy resources to continue your learning after you read it. I found it through /r/personalfinance as the other commenter suggested.

If you like that, I would also read Chapter 1 of Bernstein's Four Pillars of Investing. Bernstein's books are all more or less re-writes of the same book multiple times in an attempt to make the Bogle/indexing idea approachable for different audiences. In addition to If You Can, Chapter 1 of Four Pillars is a history of securities returns and is the best thing I've ever read in terms of getting into the right head-space for long-term investing and thinking about risk. http://www.efficientfrontier.com/t4poi/Ch1.htm The rest of the book is good, too, but you can just read If You Can instead.

I've liked other stuff by William Bernstein. His book "The Birth of Plenty" is excellent. I haven't read the pamphlet mentioned in the article, but I just downloaded it. I'll be interested to see what his advice is to younger people now. At least in the past, he was not quite the typical scold. I always liked this quote: 'An optimist might cite this as an example of the "magic of compound interest." Too much is made of this phenomenon. A pessimist would note that our industrious saver died an old man without enjoying his fortune; had he consumed even a few percent of it each year his estate would have been vastly smaller. Personally, I’d rather be a 26 year old roaming the boulevards of Paris with a few francs in my pocket than a rich old man. Everyone cannot be rich, but perhaps their grandchildren can.' (from: http://www.efficientfrontier.com/BOOK/chapter2.htm)

Harry Browne can work but it takes amazing patience that most investors will never be able to muster. Wild about Harry William J. Bernstein http://www.efficientfrontier.com/ef/0adhoc/harry.htm

I agree mutual funds are less tax efficient. However, they have an advantage of trading at NAV, which means you don't pay a bid-ask spread when buying or selling. According to The Bogleheads' Guide to Investing, the January 2001 issue of The Hulbert Financial Digest stated: "Among the 160 or so newsletters the HFD monitors, the market-timing recommendations of only 10 have beaten the stock market over the last decade on a risk-adjusted basis." So statistically there are very few newsletters with a good track record. And assuming you pick one of the few that beat the market over the past decade, you have no guarantee it will continue to do so. Past performance is not an indicator of future returns. I'd much sooner use ETFs than individual stocks to achieve tax efficiency. VT holds 4871 stocks worldwide in capitalization-weighted proportions. It would be too unwieldy to get this same diversification by holding individual stocks. And I'd argue that you really do want this much diversification. See The 15-Stock Diversification Myth: http://www.efficientfrontier.com/ef/900/15st.htm What you describe with selling the losers and buying similar stocks to replace them is known as tax-loss harvesting and is possible to achieve with ETFs as well. For example, you can hold VTI+VEA+VWO instead of VT, and tax-loss harvest into SCHB+SCHF+IEMG. It may not be as effective as with individual stocks. But I'd argue you it's hard to find a direct substitute for an individual company, so you…

On the timescale of 30 years for gov bonds vs diversified US stocks, this is almost meaningless statement. The longer a risky asset is held, the less chance of loss you’ll have. Short-horizon returns are extremely volatile, but that volatility "mean-reverts" over time. This is especially true for stocks vs bonds. Because the cash flows of bonds are fixed, prolonged inflation or rate spikes can deliver a loss that stays a loss, making long-term "safety" in bonds partly an illusion. http://www.efficientfrontier.com/t4poi/Ch1.htm

Curious for you to go a bit further here. I’d argue two links [0] [1] have all the info a regular person needs to make prudent investment decisions. Why do regular people need your research tools? More pointedly, and I ask this as someone completely unfamiliar with Daniel’s content, but does Daniel claim to beat the market or that his audience could beat the market? If so, there’s a moral hazard here, in the opinion of folks like myself that believe such advice is fairly dangerous. [0] http://efficientfrontier.com/ef/0adhoc/ifyoucan.pdf [1] https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Three-fund_portfolio

And consider also, "The 15-Stock Diversification Myth," http://www.efficientfrontier.com/ef/900/15st.htm : > One of the most dangerous investment chestnuts is the idea that you can successfully diversify your portfolio with a relatively small number of stocks, the magic number usually being about 15. > … > The reason is simple: a grossly disproportionate fraction of the total return came from a very few "superstocks" like Dell Computer, which increased in value over 550 times. If you didn’t have one of the half-dozen or so of these in your portfolio, then you badly lagged the market.

no, read if you can; free pdf of the book here: http://efficientfrontier.com/ef/0adhoc/2books.htm

No they're perfectly legal. The author is giving away the booklet for free (its only 14 pages). See the bottom half of this page: http://efficientfrontier.com/ef/0adhoc/2books.htm

You might like "The Birth of Plenty", the first chapter is online: http://www.efficientfrontier.com/ef/404/CH1.HTM It's not the pragmatic business POV, but it has some highly interesting considerations.

There's two parts to this answer. First, the numbers thrown around are that once you own 15 diversified stocks you have reduced your portfolio risk by 70 percent. That's not bad. At this point your volatility may not be that different than a market index. Of course it's different for every set of stocks, but I think this is a safe-ish guideline. So in that sense you are not missing out a whole lot. Second, and more importantly, it is very simple to put together 15 stocks with a low volatility, but also with very low returns. This is because the vast majority of the returns of an index come from a very small number of outperforming stocks. It's like the 90-10 rule. 90 percent of an index's performance comes from 10% of the stocks. Those aren't the exact numbers, but when you only pick 15 stocks, it is very likely that you will totally miss out on all outperforming stocks. Here's an article that talks about this in more depth and uses real numbers: http://www.efficientfrontier.com/ef/900/15st.htm