The Big Investment Lie: What Your Financial Advisor Doesn't Want You to Know [Hardcover]

No professional investing advice is good advice. This hard-hitting book proves it with indisputable facts drawn from scientific research and the author’s own thirty-five years of experience in the investment industry. Michael Edesess exposes “The Big Investment Lie”: that an investor will gain by hiring professional advisors to beat the market. He proves that no professional investment advisor or manager has ever consistently and predictably beat market averages, not even Warren Buffett. While The Big Investment Lie allows an entire industry to prosper lavishly, investors invariably lose when they hire professional help.

Once you know the truth, you’ll want to adopt Edesess’s Ten New Commandments for Smart Investing, simple rules you can follow to invest, get a profitable return, and avoid squandering any more of your hard-earned dollars on bogus expertise.Preface
Introduction: Excuse Me, Is This the “Real” World?

Part I: How Much You Pay
1. The Beardstown Ladies versus the Professionals
2. The Extraordinarily High Cost of Investment Advice
3. The Outer Limits: Hedge Fund Fees
4. Taxes Down the Drain
5. Why Do We Give Golden Crumbs to Rich People?

Part II: How Little You Get
6. Why Investment Professionals Can’t Predict Markets
7. The Abject Failure of Professional Advisors and Managers
8. The Market Can Turn on a Dime
9. The Claims of Money Managers: “Smoking Our Brand Prevents Cancer”
10. Idle, Greedy Hands and Too Much Data Do the Devil’s Work
11. The Simple Rules of Nobel Prize Winners
12. There’s No Such Thing as a Free Lunch
13. Investment Genius or the Thousandth Coin?

Part III: How You Are Sold
14. Effective Pitches to Sell the Big Lie
15. How Investors Delude Themselves
16. How Hedge Funds Operate and Are Sold
17. How Consultants and Money Managers Sell to Institutional Investors
18. Derivatives: The Gol“2