Honest Investment Advice is Out There (if you know where to look)

Rick Ferri – one of the brightest lights in the sometimes dark world of investing – talks about where to find honest investment advice in an environment that’s dominated by sales pitches and marketing gimmicks. You can find more information on his website rickferri.com.

Brutally Honest Investment Advice
March 22, 2012 By Rick Ferri

Getting brutally honest investment advice is a necessity when managing your money. It will save you a lot of frustration in the short-term and a lot of time and money in the long-term. Unfortunately, there are very few places you can get brutally honest advice. Magazines, newspapers, websites, and investment advisors can offer honest advice some of the time, but they’re going to be biased at other times. The magazines and newspapers have advertisers to answer to, websites have marketing deals with banks and mutual fund companies they’re trying to appease, and advisors are often promoting their whiz-bang investment ideas to get you to contact them.

The best place to get brutally honest advice is from someone who has no conflict of interest. One place on the web where you’ll find many brutally honest people is on the Bogleheads.org investing forum.

The Bogleheads® is a non-profit website that exists for investors to help other investors. The site consists of the wiki and the Bogleheads® forum. Both the wiki and forum were built by volunteers who are dedicated to helping people begin or improve their investing journey by applying the investing principles of John C. Bogle.

Jack Bogle is the founder and former Chairman of the Vanguard Group of mutual funds. Mr. Bogle created Vanguard in 1974 and served as Chairman and Chief Executive Officer until 1996 and Senior Chairman until 2000. The Vanguard Group is the largest mutual fund organization in the world. Headquartered in Malvern, Pennsylvania, Vanguard comprises more than 160 mutual funds with current assets totaling more than $1.4 trillion. The Vanguard 500 Index Fund, the largest fund in the group, was founded by Mr. Bogle in 1975. It was the first index mutual fund.

Bogleheads® investment principles have been shown to deliver risk-adjusted returns far greater than those achieved by the average investor. Although these ideas come from economic research on topics such as Modern Portfolio Theory, they are very easy to understand and to implement. Successful investing is not a complicated process, and can be accomplished by anyone who opens their minds to a different way to look the investment process. This includes seeing Wall Street for what it is and what is isn’t.

Brutally honest investing is about learning the truth and living it, or accepting the consequences for not following it. It’s rare to find this type of pure, unbiased advice in the public domain.

The Bogleheads® are a notable exception. There is a freshness that comes with integrity, and you get it from this product-free, unbiased forum, run by people who care and are dedicated to serving people who want to learn. If you’re ready to hear the hard truth, every time, then visit the site and become a member. The world needs more Bogleheads®.