We all know why we’re celebrating January 14th, right?
- Treaty ending the American Revolutionary War
- Elizabeth the First being crowned Queen of England
- Mayan warlord Siyaj K’ak’ conquering Tikal for Teotihuacan
But here’s why I’m celebrating…
After proving to himself that there are no brilliant mutual fund managers, early in 1994 Frank Armstrong began releasing, for free, his book, Investment Strategies for the 21st Century, which you can read online or download. I recommend reading a chapter every days or two so you can mull it over It differs from most investing books by being helpful and interesting. It doesn’t assume you know a lot to start with and it moves along well.
A panel of experts, consisting of myself, have chosen to celebrate the anniversary of that 1994 publication as Frank Armstrong Day, and I invite you to celebrate with me.
I’ve written about the book before in $70 in the Bank, although I wouldn’t recommend starting at the same point, but read the introduction, and let Frank make his case.
The short version is that much of personal investing is badly informed and burdened with the recommendations of salesmen who do not have your best interests at heart BUT current knowledge and recent simple, straightforward tools allow you to rival the results and low risk attainable by the ultra rich, large companies, and pension funds.
In the intervening years since the book was published, the investing industry has been dragged kicking and screaming in a good direction, the direction Armstrong called for. The Vanguard 500 Index Fund is now the biggest fund in existence and it has a number of large rivals that do the same thing. Its expenses are miniscule, risk diversified way down. It is a clean, simple, effective investment. S&P 500 returns outperformed 92% of managed funds for the past 15 year period. That doesn’t mean that 8% of those managers are geniuses, it means that a fraction of the total got lucky. Note that since low performing managed funds are killed off or merged into other funds the numbers are even more lopsided.
Look for Frank Armstrong’s other books as well, as he has continued to write clear, compelling, usable guidance to bring you the benefit of modern investing knowledge and persuade you to avoid the high cost bad advice so shamelessly pushed on you. He won’t tell you how to quintuple your money in a day, but neither will the books that try to. What he will do is teach you how to use the 8th Wonder of the World, the stock market.
