The Secret to Investment Success

Let’s face it – investing is serious business. After all, we are talking about your hard earned money being put at risk for the “chance” of some future gains. One wrong move and you can wipe out a good chunk of capital. Talk about pressure. However, every once in a while we need to step back and lighten up a little bit. To that end, I present to you a passage by the famous Dave Barry in his book, “Money Secrets”:

…the only way to make money in the stock market is to use a rational system, based on solid information, not guesswork. The only proven way to make money in the market is to follow this three-step procedure:

Step 1: Gather all available financial data on the top one thousand stocks for the past 25 years.
Step 2: By conducting a thorough analysis of each stock – taking into consideration its performance against the overall market, splits, price/earnings ratio, earned run average, etc. – select the ten stocks that have performed best in this time period.
Step 3: Using a time machine, go back twenty-five years and buy these stocks.

This system is pretty much foolproof except for one teensy flaw, which you may have already detected: You are way too lazy to do the research. Most people are.

There you have it – now go out an make some money.