the social scientist.

The Most Dangerous Place to Get Investing Advice

I too caught the irony of your title. However, good stuff. I did retire at 54 using technical trading, but I haven't done very well for 5 years now, and I will never make the Forbes 400 or 1 million list. Only down 2% YTD, however.

May I add another wrinkle on other people's investment advice? When the conventional opinion is fairly uniform, go the other way. And this includes advice on some sound value companies. For years, Washington Mutual showed up on lists of most recommended stocks. Of course, following your advice above to avoid stocks with more than 40% debt, you would avoid all financials, right?

Another example - last year investment advisers were uniform in recommending diversification into international stocks (and commodities), probably because of the declining dollar which was destined to decline further because that was the chart trend. That worked well, didn't it?

Right now, Walmart is the most recommended stock. That would presumably mean it has a lot of support from institutional buyers, but it's not going to be a good long-term prospect. Too big to grow much, and it's a retailer, a sector like airlines. They come, they go.