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| *Ostroff, Fair and Company>>>Investing |
Free books about the stock market? |
Where can I get free books about the stock market? My book is free and available to anyone who wants to read it. It can be downloaded from my website, with no strings attached. Click on my profile and read my info to get the website. I cannot list it here, as Yahoo considers this "spam", even though I am not selling anything. Here are exerpts from my book: "We have now entered an era where, unfortunately, the average person will need to take on the burden of investing knowledge. But as things get seemingly more complicated, the fact is that simplicity is all you need. Most investors would do just fine with 3 broad-based index funds (total bond market index fund, total domestic stock index fund, total international stock index fund), holding all the major asset classes in a low-cost format. How hard is that? Once you have demystified the "skills" of fund managers and have seen the truth about costs, you will be able to invest wisely on your own, confident in your decisions. And whether you like it or not, the burden is being shifted to you. Most employers are phasing out "defined benefit" plans (a.k.a. pensions), where they handle the liability of paying for your retirement. Even our government-sponsored pension plan, called Social Security, will probably run into some rough waters. Instead, employers are unanimously adopting "defined contribution" plans, where you contribute most of the money. These plans also make you responsible for the investment decisions. To help, your human resources department usually provides a pamphlet to guide you through picking your funds. It's a nice gesture, but this is simply inadequate. Investing is not a tough subject, but you need more than a 6-page-pamphlet worth of knowledge to steer yourself through the torrents of the investing world. If you do not get a fundamental education on investing, you will not learn how to tune the noise out and will become Wall Street's next victim." - page 8 "Money managers cannot have their cake and eat it too. A fund manager cannot select high-paying stocks with low risk, because such stocks do not exist. Managers must choose their risk level and then accept the return bestowed upon that particular section of the market. Neither can they hold risky stocks only when the stocks are performing well and then dump them before they plummet. There is no evidence of any ability for fund managers to consistently sidestep the unfortunate stocks while only holding the successful ones. The long-term returns of a mutual fund are attributed to the risk level of stocks held in the portfolio, not because of skill from the money manager. Naive investors will sometimes look at raw data, comparing funds of different risk levels, and pick the higher performing fund without considering its volatility. To make a proper assessment, apples must be compared to apples, not oranges. Only a fund's risk-adjusted return is of importance. To do this, investors should ask, "How does the fund compare to other funds of the same type?" What the studies are saying is that, over the long run, there is little difference in risk-adjusted returns for mutual funds of the same type. For example, small-cap stock funds tend to give very similar gross returns over 10 years or longer. It is extremely difficult, if not impossible, for one particular small-cap fund manager to outdo his small-cap peers over time. He may outdo the large-cap funds, but only because small-cap stocks are riskier than large-caps. The return to investors is the gross return (the actual returns of the stocks and bonds) minus any expenses that the fund extracts. If long-term gross returns are very similar for funds of a particular type, then the true differentiating factor is their expense. This is why most actively-managed funds cannot outdo their index fund counterparts. Their expenses are higher. For example, if two large-cap funds earned 10% annualized gross returns, but the actively-managed fund had a 2% expense ratio while the index fund had a 0.5% expense ratio, the net returns to investors would be 8% and 9.5% respectively. The investors in the index fund got more return without taking on more risk simply because of lower costs. It is no surprise Vanguard has discovered that over a period of 10 years index funds beat about 70 - 80% of actively managed funds. Over a period of 15 years, index funds beat about 94% of actively managed funds (of the same type)." - page 72 "The greatest trick the mutual fund industry ever pulled was convincing investors that an extra percent in expenses did not matter. From the perspective of the average investor, a percent here or there is inconsequential. I intend to prove otherwise. The problem arises from the way expenses are reported - percentage of total assets. Right there, it makes costs look small. It is natural to see a 1.5% expense ratio and think, "This is not much". We pay 6% sales tax on purchases, so 1.5% seems like a gift from heaven. But our frame of reference is wrong. Percentage of assets is not the proper way to evaluate costs. Why? Because we are not paying fund managers to simply hold our money. We would place it in a bank if that was our goal. Instead, we pay managers to make money. We need to ask, "How much of our return do costs take?" I will answer that question in a few pages, but for now let's talk about fund expenses." - page 161 The Library. If I could give apmsjps 10,000 thumbs up, I would. If it's not at the library and it's free, then it must be worth exactly zero. Hi, here is a collection of informative articles about investing. a free online investing tutorial for you. http://www.investingtutorial.info/... good luck ! wish you make fortune from investing ! |
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