I completed The Future for Investors: Why the Tried and the True Triumph Over the Bold and the New by Jeremy Siegel today. It provides a great deal of analysis of what historical stock market returns for various strategies have been. The subtitle captures the basic theme of the book. Investing in the boring old stocks that people are not excited about is what have performed best.
His basic advise is still to buy the broadest market index fund (such as the Vanguard Total Stock Market Index Fund [the broken link was removed]). He also concludes with the advice that those returns have been beaten historically by focusing on stocks with high dividend yields and low price earnings ratios.
To me you can skim though the book pretty quickly. The book is not full of subtle concepts you might miss. Warren Buffet is quoted as saying “Jeremy Siegel’s new fact and ideas should be studied by investors” and his advise is probably is more useful than what I think.
I recommend other investing books more but The Future of Investors is also worth reading.
