The Smartest Investment Book You'll Ever Read

Daniel Solin's The Smartest Investment Book You'll Ever Read is a beginner's guide to becoming a Boglehead. The main point is be an investor in the entire global market, not a trader that tries to beat the market. Yes, some people beat the market, but the number of people who do so for sustained periods of time are very rare. There are some folks that get lucky for a couple years, but trying to figure out those lucky people is a fool's errand. In addition to that random possibility of losing money due to a bad manager, active trading has higher expenses, both in transaction costs and for mutual funds, in overhead. An actively managed mutual fund that has an expense ratio of over 1% has to perform at least 1% better than its matching index fund before an investor will receive higher returns, and the historical record of actively managed mutual funds shows that the vast majority of them actually perform worse than a relevant index fund.