Book Report: Investor's Manifesto

I just finished reading Investor's Manifesto by William Bernstein; this is an incredible guide to retirement and offers unique insights into how to easily plan for a decent retirement. The author has spent a ton of time writing financial books and collaborating with some of the best financial minds out there, and offers an amazingly simple and yet incredibly hard to beat approach to maximizing your stock returns.

A quick recap of the book roughly by chapter:
1) History shows us many financial bubbles. Countless have happened in the past, and undoubtedly more will happen again.
2) The stock market is unpredictable. It's folly to think anyone can consistently time the market or predict the future; chartists, advisors, professionals all cannot repeatedly do this. It's nonsense to think anyone can.
3) A realistic investment goal is simply to match market performance. Index funds are a very cheap and easy way to do this; Vanguard offers many very cheap index funds that very closely mirror various markets (eg. stock market, bonds, international companies, real estate, etc.)
4) The enemy is you. Most often the biggest cause of investment loses come strictly from the investor! People who too closely monitor their finances may commit to the worst financial move: selling low & buying high.
5) Financial companies make a lot of money by taking yours. In the long run, investors are better off avoiding investment professionals and instead simply trying to match market performance.
6) A great formula for investing is: take your age, and buy that % in bonds (eg. a 30 year old holds 30% bonds). Take 100 - your age and invest that % in stocks (eg. a 30 year old invests 70% in stocks) Rebalance this annually to adjust for your changing age and also to move money into the cheapest asset. You can adjust this formula for risk tolerance; if you're more conservative or more aggressive, adjust the percentages accordingly.
7) Keep your investment strategy very simple. You can outperform so many other professional investors this way. The index strategy is the safest/best long term strategy one can realistically count on.

Meat, sickness

US Meat and Poultry Is Widely Contaminated With Drug-Resistant Staph Bacteria, Study Finds
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/04/110415083153.htm

I've seen plenty of articles like this about mass produced meat making us sick; I've hardly felt sick at all after 2 years of vegetarianism, and that was after getting sick ALL THE TIME as a carnivore. Could be a coincidence, but I'll continue avoiding meat.

Slax: securely viewing the net

If you're like me at all, you're somewhat fearful of putting your login name & password into financial websites. Even though any respectable website is configured to send that data encrypted (so nobody can steal it while it's sent across the internet,) it's still very possible that the computer you typed that into has been compromised. Yep, even if it's your very own computer that you know well & take immaculately good care of.

If you're at all like me, you occasionally install random patches or software to do all kinds of things. Or, you just surf the net or click links friends email you. All of that can very easily lead to viruses on your computer. And even regularly running virus detection software can't eliminate all nasty viruses. Have you heard of the Zeus virus? This is the scariest virus I've ever heard of; it's ingeniously designed to be easily spread, undetectable by most virus software (eg. Mcafee, Norton, etc.) and guess what it does? It steals your bank account passwords! I would hate to watch my bank account mysteriously drained by something like this. I'm not just trying to make mountains out of molehills; this is a genuine serious issue and has infected millions of computers in the US.

Every once in awhile, I find a new virus on my computer. I consider my computer usage relatively safe, but still this happens. So what can you do to be safe? I've seen a few solutions. First, I'm very inspired by Gmail's 2-factor authentication feature. That's a lot of words that basically mean it doesn't matter if someone steals your login name & password; they still can't login. I can't wait for more financial sites to offer this capability; but knowing the speed at which many large financial institutions operate, my gut feeling is it will be awhile before this happens. Another option I've seen people employ is to have a dedicated computer that is used only for logging into financial sites. This seems a bit extreme to me, but in theory is a bit safer than what most people currently do. Others use Macs or Linux, which have a far lower risk of nasty viruses; this seems a better solution, but again not perfect and doesn't work for me due to some programs I want only being available for PCs. You could partition your hard drive and install a couple operating systems on it; this would work, but is only for the very computer savvy. My recommended solution that even grandma can use: use the free software Slax. Slax is an entire operating system that lives on a CD; I simply burn their software to CD, pop it in my computer's CD tray, and boot up to it for safe & secure internet browsing. I can still run Windows, use all the programs I like, and boot safely into Slax when I want to be extra sure I'm browsing safely. The only risk here is I have to trust the developers who release Slax and believe they haven't distributed something like Zeus on it! I'm hopeful this is not something they have done. And, it does take 5 or so minutes every time I want to switch operating systems. While this isn't a perfect solution, it's a FAR safer one from just logging in via a browser on windows.

So, I highly recommend the very easy to use Slax to anyone who shares my fears. And if you have other creative solutions to this problem, I'd love to hear.