Just finished listening to John Bogels common sense investing. Even though it is a little out of date, only speaks up to 2006 so its missing the crash, I think his advise is still sound.
Active managers know a lot about recent trends and they are always trying to sell the next best index or the next best diversification strategy. They probably aren't lying either when they note that their strategy they are selling has beaten the total market for x amount of year. But over the long term, save for the introduction of the first indexes, no new fancy weighting strategy for indexing or special index has been game changing or outperformed total market diversification through traditional indexes.
The simple sound advice remains. Buy and hold a broadly diversified portfolio with Stock and Bonds weighted to your risk preference and time line. Second buy the whole stock market. It isn't sexy, it isn't exciting, and it may even lose in the short term to say buy a Growth or Value index. And those are the reasons why active managers will always be trying peddle new things.
Its possible one day someone will discover something that works better than a traditional total stock market index, but it hasn't happened yet.
At the end of the day your best long term bet is to play it stupid and hold the total US stock market as closely as you can. Then buy a smaller portion of the total international stock market. And cushion it with your Bond index. Until you see investor of the ilk of Warren Buffet and John Bogel come out of the wood work and start writing books about how we have had it all wrong it is probably best to ignore people who suggest you should do something different for a fee with the vast majority of your long term money. You would be setting yourself up to lose in the long term the majority of the time.
If you want to test out an active manager for fun, give them at most 5-10% of your money to invest. But keep the rest in the tried and true funds.
How much do they want to charge you for this sage advice?
