Oh my God what a waste of time and money! Author Michael Edleson comes up with this ridiculous (and impractical) spin on the tried and true dollar cost averaging, and calls it “value averaging” just to sell a book. He spends 232 pages trying to convince you to try it his way over a 45 year work career and your retirement fund will achieve an entire .78% return  over dollar cost averaging. Good grief. His complicated strategy has you recalculating your basic investment each month! He even has you selling off shares in an up month! The whole thing is asinine. The new Roth IRA limit for 2019 is $7,000 dollars (age 50+, $6,000 otherwise). Divide that up by 12 and you have $553 dollars a month to put into a low cost Vanguard ETF index fund. Edleson would have you up all night with a financial calculator and reams of paper! [As a public service, I am going to throw this book away, rather than sell it back to Half Price Books for a $1 dollar towards my next book.]

Right on the tail of that book is one by Martin Pring called, ‘Investing in the Second Lost Decade’. They had a good premise, the 2000’s were a complete wash with the Tech Bubble and The Global Financial Crisis. Between the Federal Reserve and Wall Street shenanigans, the small investor was taken to the cleaners while the big banks were bailed out and given bonuses. Instead of prepping people how to cope with government and banking malfeasance, Pring pushes his new business cycle theory to sell a book and warm people up to the idea of investing in his EFT of the same theory, DBIZ. Pring wasted 234 pages and killed God knows how many trees for his idiotic book. You know his theory didn’t hold water, his ETF introduced at the end of 2012 was closed by 2015. “Lack of investor interest“.

Wall Street of course is nothing but a den of liars and thieves and they have continued that into book sales. I think cross matching the results from 5 different “Top 10 Best Investing Books” search, would yield some classically good books instead of these clunkers. Its kind of like the secret is finally out on fund managers, they can’t beat the index. For all their high prices and fancy suits, 90% of them can’t beat an index fund.