Also, the system does need some active management - passive investors are freeloading and not aiding price discovery, so if the whole market went passive then active investment would win handily.
The kind of people who do well at price discovery are big banks with complex computer models and expert analysts. Why do you think that an individual has a got chance at playing that game?
The company I work for manages about a hundred billion dollars in our various funds. We cater to retail clients. I don't pick stocks myself - a bunch of people with three computer screens and Bloomberg subscriptions down in the financial district do that. I simply take the resulting mutual funds and sell them to people(and do a hundred other things - the investment side is probably the easiest part of my job).
Follow-Up to: A Guide to Rational Investing Financial Planning Sequence (defunct) The Rational Investor
What are your recommendations and ideas about financial effectiveness?
This post is created in response to a comment on this Altruistic Effectiveness post and thus may have a slight focus on EA. But it is nonetheless meant as a general request for financial effectiveness information (effectiveness as in return on invested time mostly). I think this could accumulate a lot of advice and become part of the Repository Repository (which surprisingly has not much advice of this kind yet).
I seed this with a few posts about this found on LessWrong in the comments. What other posts and links about financial effectiveness do you know of?
Rules:
General Advice (from Guide to Rational Investing):
So what are your recommendations? You may give advanced as well as simple advice. The more the better for this to become a real repository. You may also repeat or link advice given elsewere on LessWrong.