The Prudent I nvestor's Guide to Beating Wall Street at Its Own Game

Customer Reviews

1. No one can predict the market (except for Wall Street Professionals)
2. The biggest mistake you can make is taking your money out of stocks and bonds once they are deposited (except to pay your advisor).
3. Don't trust your instincts, trust your Wall Street professional's instincts.

At the end of the book, probably hoping they have convinced their reader of his utter ignorance regarding money management, they kindly offer a chapter on finding your 'financial advisor', closing with their own email mailing addresses.

Guess what you are supposed to do.

The book is full of odd contradictions.

1. It's title proudly claims to be about 'beating' Wall Street, but the conclusion extols reliance on a 'financial advisor'.

2. For the first 3 chapters, the authors claim to accept 'random walk' theories, and points out the inability of top ranked fund managers to maintain their ranking as proof of the randomness of the market. For the remainder of the book, we are constantly advised only a professional can distinguish a long term positive rate of return. In other words, it's not a random walk. The guy's picking your asset class funds can suddenly defeat the random walk.

3. There is a chapter on defining your financial goals, but when determining your 'investment time frame', the authors advise using your life expectancy. Let me explain this to you. They advise putting your money in a Wall Street fund and updating your will. You should never plan on 'cashing out' and enjoying your rewards. That's pretty safe investment advice, if the client is alive, the money should stay put and the plan is still on track, even if it is down 70%. If he's dead, he won't sue over the bad advice.

4. In chapter 6 and 7, they advise ignoring tax implications. Chapter 8 is on investing with taxes in mind.

5. In the intro, the authors promise to show you how to do the math yourself. At the end of the book, there is just a bunch of formulas that refer to other formulas with values left undefined. I guess they figured no one was going to follow the math, and if they would, they were not their type of client, anyway.

What you will learn through this book (backed by academic research primarily by the University of Chicago):

1) An overview of modern portfolio theory, which states that there is an optimal risk/reward curve that allows you to determine the appropriate mix between stocks and bonds for any given expected level of return or tolerance for risk.

2) Regardless of your tolerance for risk or desire for reward, the only thing that changes is the overall % allocation between stocks and bonds. When any investor looks at stocks, they should have the same makeup of stocks in their porfolio (international, large cap value, small cap, etc.). The difference between more and less agressive investors is that the stock composition will be a bigger piece of their pie.

3) Statistical analysis that gives strong proof that index funds ... beat mutual funds handily over the long run by several percentage points.

This book has provided me with the best framework for investing. It's a little redundant (as most informational books are), but well worth the read. I've purchased many copies of it and given them to friends and family.

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