I read your post, nodded my head, said out lout mmhmm, mhmmm....then realized I had no idea what most of the acronyms you were referencing even stand for, much less the concepts they represent. I'm assuming you had an education in finance in college/profession. I'm in the medical field so I have absolutely no working knowledge of any of those concepts. I would love to be a resource for people in my field that is more advanced than "Put it all in index funds." Are there any comprehensive free-online courses where I could turbocharge my education in this field? I am extremely motivated and when I get my targets set on something, I gobble up information and hold on to it forever. Do the KhanAcademies/MIT Open Courseware/etc. places have anything along the lines that you would recommend?
Generally I would recommend to folks that just want to touch their investments no more than once a year, to read stuff by William Berstein, John Bogle, Rick Ferri, Larry Swedroe, David Swensen, and others. Unfortunately (or fortunately), 'putting it all in index funds' is the best that most people can do. And it's the best advice you can give most people. They should spend their research time figuring out an intelligent asset allocation, and then get on with their lives to make as much money as possible to put into their portfolio.
But if you are curious, and you want to get a little more advanced, Mebane Faber writes some good stuff that's easy to understand. The Ivy Portfolio, his relative strength research papers on SSRN, Shareholder Yield and Global Value are all good books.
If that's still not enough for you, and you want to really go down the rabbit trail of active investing/trading (assuming you've already gone through the basic investing books above), then here you go:
Talent is Overrated by Geoff Colvin - this will tell you the effort you'll need to give to be the few % that actually can outperform the market
Michael Lewis and Jack Schwager are both good authors that cover the industry as a whole and make for entertaining reads, especially Schwager's Market Wizards books.
Value Investing authors:
Benjamin Graham
Philip Fisher
Joel Greenblatt
Whitney Tilson
Peter Lynch
Warren Buffett's letters to shareholders
David Einhorn
Growth/Momentum stock trading authors:
Jesse Livermore
Nicholas Darvas
William O'Neil
Martin Zweig
Stan Weinstein
Mark Minervini
Trend Following/Global Macro authors:
George Soros
Michael Covel (his podcast is fantastic and has a variety of guests - economists, psychologists, authors, entrepreneurs, traders, value investors, portfolio managers etc, I'd recommend listening to all the past episodes)
Andreas Clenow
Curtis Faith
Trading/Investing Psychology authors (this is actually the most important):
Brett Steenbarger
Mark Douglas
Van K Tharp
Ari Kiev
Technical Analysis/Chart Pattern authors:
Robert Edwards/John Magee
John Murphy
Steve Nison
Jeffrey Hirsch
Robert Prechter
Peter Brandt
Alexander Elder
Thomas Bulkowski
That should be enough reading for the next couple of years...