Index Funds: The 12-step Program for Active Investors

The financial services industry has a dark secret, one that costs global investors about $2.5 trillion per year. This secret quietly drains the investment portfolios and retirement accounts of almost every investor. In 1900, French mathematician, Louis Bachelier, unsuspectingly revealed this disturbing fact to the world. Since then, hundreds of academic studies have supported Bachelier's findings. This book offers overwhelming proof of this, and shows investors how to obtain their optimal rate of return by matching their risk capacity to an appropriate risk exposure. A globally diversified portfolio of index funds is the optimal way to accomplish this. Index Funds is the treatment of choice for wayward investors. Below market returns in investment portfolios and pension accounts are the result of investors gambling with their hard earned money. This 12-Step Program will put active investors on the road to recovery. Each step is designed to bring investors closer to embracing a prudent and sound strategy of buying, holding, and rebalancing an index portfolio.

Mark T. Hebner is the president of Index Funds Advisors in Irvine, California. His flagship Web site, ifa.com, is considered the leading Internet source of information on index funds. He led a team of over 60 writers, artists, graphic designers, mathematicians, statisticians, and researchers to build the Internet's most comprehensive Web site on index funds. Hebner has been founder, president, and CEO of three companies, one of which became a publicly held corporation. Since discovering the index funds philosophy, he has worked tirelessly to educate the investing public on the advantages of investing in index funds.