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The Most Dangerous Place to Get Investing Advice

Though I too liked the tone and common-sense theme of this article, it was about 20 paragraphs too long.

If the author had simply dusted off his Burton Malkiel (A Random Walk Down Wall Street), he would see all of the metrics that indicate why it's not a good idea to speculate on market bets (value or otherwise). Malkiel makes an indisputable historic observation about the valuelessness of green-eye-shade technical analysis, stock gurus, actively managed mutual fund investing, and the inevitable market bubbles created by the greatest fool who is last to enter those boom periods.

A simple, more effective, and boring approach for a long-term investor is to dollar-cost average into broadly based indices and forget about trying to achieve what can never be achieved --- becoming the one who truly understands what a company does, what is its true value, and even worse, what it will become in the future.

The market is efficient, and those who try to predict do so at their own peril.