Burton G. Malkiel

I happened to read this at the perfect timing when there are so much volatility and fireworks in the stock market.

It blends history, market theories/approaches, and biases when investing and offers actionable advice.

If I would have to choose one quote to summarize the book, it definitely would be this one:

A blindfolded monkey throwing darts at a newspaper’s financial pages could select a portfolio that would do just as well as one carefully selected by experts.

Thus the random walk:

Random walk theory assumes the past movement or trend of a stock price or market cannot be used to predict its future movement. In short, random walk theory proclaims that stocks take a random and unpredictable path that makes all methods of predicting stock prices futile in the long run.

With this in mind, the author makes fun of fundamental/technical analysis. He advises to build a portfolio based on a person's age and risk tolerance and constantly rebalance it. The longer the time period over which you can hold on to your investments, the greater should be the share of common stocks in your portfolio. Invest in low-cost, tax-efficient, broad-based index funds if you do not want to get beaten by a blindfolded monkey.… (més)

A Random Walk Down Wall Street gets its title from Malkiel's view that markets are mostly efficient and therefore stocks' prices take into account all available information and that their day to day movements are random and difficult if not impossible to predict. This leads him to an investing philosophy much like Vanguard group's Bogle (Malkiel is a trustee) which is to veer away from trying to pick individual stocks and to go with a low-cost index fund. But while Bogle very much limited his recommended choice to a few funds that represented the market, like the S&P 500 Index, and some bond index funds, Malkiel's investment portfolio is more expansive. He agrees that Bogle's choices should be a person's bedrock foundation, but also allows for other vehicles like Multi Factor Smart Beta, REITs, ETFs, and a few others. His book is no Little Book of Investing and therefore he has chapters on various historical and contemporary bubbles, theories of investing, asset management, and retirement planning, topics not covered in Bogle's book. At 300+ pages, it looks intimidating when you first flip through it, with multiple sections, chapters, tables, and graphs. But for the most part it is extremely plainly written for the lay investor and with a few exceptions here and there, pretty easy to follow. It's also actionable. While I did not go out and buy any new products after finishing it, I did review my asset allocation and determined that I may be too heavily invested in stocks for my age and I turned on my rebalancer. Much of your own decision making will come down to your particular risk tolerance - what Malkiel refers to as your risk to sleep index. If you can tolerate a lot of risk and not lose any sleep over what many feel is an inevitable drop, you may want to go all in on the current bull market even into retirement.… (més)