A Random Walk Down Wall Street: Final Thoughts and Key Takeaways
This is the last post in the series, and I want to step back from the details. No more beta coefficients or efficient-market debates. Just the big picture.
Index funds
Index Funds and Smart Stock Picking Rules
After fourteen chapters of theory, history, and bubbles, Malkiel finally gets to the practical stuff. Chapter 15 is called “Three Giant Steps Down Wall Street.” It’s his playbook. Three ways to actually invest your money.
Why I'm Reading a Random Walk Down Wall Street
I picked up this book because I kept hearing the same advice everywhere: just buy index funds. But nobody really explained why. They’d say things like “you can’t beat the market” and leave it at that.
Trading and Exchanges Chapter 23: Index Funds, ETFs, and Portfolio Trading
If you have money in a Vanguard or Fidelity index fund, or you buy SPY or VOO through your brokerage app, Chapter 23 is basically about you. Harris wrote this in 2003, but it reads like a prediction of what actually happened. Index investing went from a niche idea to the default way normal people invest. This chapter explains why.
Mutual Fund Operations: Types, Fees, Performance, and ETFs
Book: Financial Markets and Institutions, 11th Edition Author: Jeff Madura Publisher: Cengage Learning, 2015 ISBN: 978-1-133-94788-2
Chapter 23 covers mutual funds, and it is packed. This is one of the longer chapters because mutual funds are such a big part of the financial system. There are more than 7,500 different mutual funds in the US with total assets of about $12 trillion. If you have a retirement account, you are almost certainly invested in one.
Index and Portfolio Trading: ETFs, Futures, and Basket Markets (Chapter 23)
Index trading is one of the most important financial innovations of the twentieth century. And after reading Chapter 22 about how hard it is to identify skilled managers, you can understand why.
A Tour of the Fund House: Peter Lynch's Guide to Mutual Funds
Book: Beating the Street by Peter Lynch with John Rothchild | ISBN: 978-0-671-75915-5
Mutual funds were supposed to make investing easy. Instead of picking stocks yourself, you just pick a fund. But here’s the thing. By the early ’90s there were more mutual funds than individual stocks on the New York and American exchanges combined. So now you had to pick from 3,565 funds. The confusion didn’t go away. It multiplied.