Thread: 'Laziest Portfolio' 2004 winner"

Rolo, beware of performance chasing, ie,dumping a significant amount of your assets into a fund or asset class with recent high performance just beforethe fund/asset class reverts to the mean. Very easy to get burned by doing this. Also, beware of following the herd. The current wisdom (noise) of the herd appears to bethat investors should shift the composition of the equity portion of theportfolio away fromsmall caps and international to large cap domestic growth. I believe that is what we saw around the first of the year with small caps - folks rebalancing out of small to large based on a herding instinct. According to the herd,the whole investingparadigm changed when we passed from 2004 to 2005.

Rokid, there is very good info to be gleaned from Farrell's book but he seems to beall over the placein his weekly column. Very inconsistent message. For example, in one of his columns last year,he predicted a major market crash in 2004 resulting from a domestic terrorist attack and advised readers to adjust accordingly.In retrospect, very bad advice. Read his stuff with a grain of salt.

Sounds like you have already read most of my favorites. You might be interested in reading the many books written by Larry Swedroe. Jonathan Clements is also very good. Rick Ferri might also be of interest.

In"The Intelligent Asset Allocator",Bill Bernstein discusses a moderate DAA strategy. Beyond that, I have not read anythingcompelling.There are many data miners out there claiming superior backtested results. Past performance is no guarantee of future performance. Caveat Emptor.

Coffeehouseinvestor.com includesvery concise advise for beginners. Would highly recommend this webpage. "The CoffeehouseInvestor" by Bill Schultheis is a very good beginners book but is currently out of print. Bill indicated on the Vanguard Diehards forum that an updated version will be out later thisyear.

Pete