Re: Another book question
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Read anything by Swedroe or Ferri on why actively picking stocks for long term investing is a losers game.
You can't and won't win. (winning as defined by beating index).
See academic papers by Fama and French.
Basically, the sell-side of Wall Street is a scam.
"Lets take your money and my experience and turn it into my money and your experience" is their mission statement.
Most diehard indexers recommend value and small cap tilt and a big chunk of (half of equities) split in NON-US - i.e. equal weightings of VPL,VGK,EEM/VWO,EFV and VINEX.
Good luck
These opinions are from the 90s. According to my old empirical finance prof very few academics believe in the Efficient Market Hypothesis by now.
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Actually several of those books are recent, as is some of the research cited.
Your professor is right about one thing - its worse now than ever before for the individual investor.
The big brokerage houses have "black boxes" generating amazing trading profits (see Goldman blowout quarter for example).
Hedge funds generating huge commissions get analyst downgrades/upgrades and other info FIRST from the trading desks of the big brokerage houses.
The individual investor has zero shot. EMH may not be a reality for the black boxes, proprietery trading desks, inside traders (see rebock insider trading scandal) or active investors like Icahn and Buffett but it is for the average man on the street.
To say otherwise flies in the face of mountains of evidence.
Even the great Warren Buffet said "our stay-put behavior reflects our view that the stock market serves as a relocation center at which money is moved from the active to the passive"
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