I shouldn't reference the same book on consecutive days, but David Swensen, the astonishingly successful active investment manager of the Yale Endowment fund talks about strategies like the "Dogs of the Dow" gambit in his "Pioneering Portfolio Management" .
His take (at least as I read his wonderful book) is that these sorts of simplistic gambits regularly look great and over long stretches of time--right up until the point when they burn the naive investors who thought something so simple would work long term.
P.S. Swensen's book for individual investors, "Unconventional Success," says we individual investors ought to use a tiny handful of cheap index funds... specifically funds with 30% US stocks, 15% each in intermediate treasuries, TIPS, REITs and developed international stocks, and then 10% in emerging market stocks. FWIW, I use Swensen's individual asset allocation formula, employing cheap Vanguard index funds as my building blocks.