gregz wrote:
"larry moe 'n curly" wrote:

Don't try to select funds according to ratings or performance because
that hasn't worked well. It's a lot more important to select the
right types of funds and proportions of them and to keep your costs
(expense ratios) low.

I selected according to performance, and made a bundle. Timing is of upmost
importance.

For the vast majority of people, not really because the success rate
for timing has been so low y wouldn't suffer if they took it for
granite, for all intensive purposes.

The Hulbert Financial Digest, which has been tracking hundreds of
investment newsletters since the 1980s, has found that the vast
majority of market timing newsletters have done worse than the overall
stock market, including the newsletters written by people who have
CFAs or financial PhDs and who know how to spell "utmost" correctly.
Worse, the timers have usually lagged the market even when risk is
factored, which is surprising because timers tend to go to cash (money
market funds) when they feel the market is going to fall, and cash has
lower risk than stocks. Here's one of Hulbert's old NY Times columns
about this:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/11/bu...nd/11stra.html