I especially agree with your statement “Stay away from performance returns where there are never any losses. Oftentimes they are not real!” I see many people looking for the holy grail and believing they found it in fraudulent performance numbers.

I talk about this, and portfolio diversification, throughout my book “Jackass Investing: Don’t do it. Profit from it.” (#1 Amazon Kindle best-seller in the mutual fund category). In the book I explore 20 common (and costly) investment myths and show why they’re myths and not truths, and then show people how to exploit that fact for profit.

The book’s been called “controversial” but also “ground-breaking.” Controversial because it exposes as false several well-accepted financial planning and asset allocation myths. Ground-breaking because most people finish it and see the fresh logic in its approach.

The main point that is related to your article is in my approach to diversification, which is quite different from conventional investment wisdom. One concept I think you’ll find most interesting is in that I replace asset classes with “return drivers” and “trading strategies” (as I point out in the book, asset classes are simply long-only trading strategies that do not attempt to disaggregate their many separate return drivers). Once viewed in this fashion it is easy to create a truly diversified portfolio, rather than one constrained by the shackles of asset classes.

This allows me to then demonstrate the difference between a “Poor-folio,” one that follows “conventional” investment wisdom, and a truly diversified portfolio. True portfolio diversification provides you with the ability to profit across a variety of market conditions, earning the equivalent of a “Free Lunch” (chapter 20), where you can earn both greater returns and less risk. It’s amazing to me how logical this all is yet so few people actually embrace it.

Let me know if you’d like a complimentary eBook. I’d be glad to send you one.

Thank you again