All the investment advice you’ll ever need (in just one blog post)
In short: A panel of experts brought in by Google to advise their employees pre-IPO recommended buying index funds, not actively managed mutual funds. Their reasoning? The statistical improbability of outperforming the market is less than 100:1, and the amount you beat the market by gets eroded anyways by the higher fees you’ll be paying for the service of having a human fund manager.
An added gem: There’s a great link in the article to a Mutual Fund/ETF Expense Analyzer, which lets you compare up to 3 funds for their performance upon an amount and term length you enter.
San Francisco Magazine – The best investment advice you’ll never get
As Google’s historic August 2004 IPO approached, the company’s senior vice president, Jonathan Rosenberg, realized he was about to spawn hundreds of impetuous young multimillionaires. They would, he feared, become the prey of Wall Street brokers, financial advisers, and wealth managers, all offering their own get-even-richer investment schemes. Scores of them from firms like J.P. Morgan Chase, UBS, Morgan Stanley, and Presidio Financial Partners were already circling company headquarters in Mountain View with hopes of presenting their wares to some soon-to-be-very-wealthy new clients.
One by one, some of the most revered names in investment theory were brought in to school a class of brilliant engineers, programmers, and cybergeeks on the fine art of personal investing, something few of them had thought much about. First to arrive was Stanford University’s William (Bill) Sharpe, 1990 Nobel Laureate economist and professor emeritus of finance at the Graduate School of Business. Sharpe drew a large and enthusiastic audience, which he could have wowed with a PowerPoint presentation on his “gradient method for asset allocation optimization†or his “returns-based style analysis for evaluating the performance of investment funds.â€
But he spared the young geniuses all that complexity and offered a simple formula instead. “Don’t try to beat the market,†he said. Put your savings into some indexed mutual funds, which will make you just as much money (if not more) at much less cost by following the market’s natural ebb and flow, and get on with building Google.