Malkiel is the author of A Random Walk Down Wall Street, long considered to be one of the classic books on investment, so I thought I'd check out this book by him, as well.
I think I've been studying investing too long now, as absolutely nothing in here came as a surprise to me. He and his co-author, to varying degrees, simply advocate buying broadly-based index funds with low expense ratios and relying on the overall market to deliver perfectly good returns without worry nor fuss. Pick an age-appropriate asset allocation, with a certain percentage allocated to bond funds, a percentage to international stocks and a percentage to domestic stocks, rebalance annually, and you can go on blissfully enjoying life on autopilot until retirement.
They provide a lot of data, painstakingly gathered over the years, to support their conclusions, which I certainly can't refute, and probably wouldn't want to. My only problem with it is it's all just so...boring. What would I fiddle with and fixate upon if I just handled all of my investments that way?
All kidding aside, this is actually very sound strategy, and could have been summed up in a simple news headline, rather than a novel-length work of non-fiction. However, it's a good idea to provide the facts to back up one's arguments, and Malkiel has done just that.
For the most part, I suppose, in my own strategy within 401k plans offered by my employers over the years, I have done something very similar to that, picking three or four funds, setting the autobalance switch to "on" and letting it ride until something changed, such as adding or removing fund selections by the custodial firm running the plan. And I've certainly recommended something similar to my own children and employees (surrogate children) over the years.
A pretty decent book for those just encountering the idea of retirement investing, but nothing new nor exciting for those of us who have been around a while.
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