Index Funds: The 12-Step Recovery Program for Active Investors

by Mark T. Hebner

Overview

Winner of Finance at the 2024 Book Excellence Awards
Nonfiction Book Awards Silver Medal Recipient 2024
Winner of Best Business Book at the New England Book Festival 2023
​Winner of Best Business/Technology Book at the Southern California Book Festival 2023

"A no-nonsense guide to disciplined investing, full of deep insights framed in compelling ways."
—Kirkus Reviews

The financial services industry has a dark secret, one that costs global investors trillions of dollars every year!
This secret quietly drains the investment portfolios and retirement accounts of almost every investor. In 1900, French mathematician Louis Bachelier unwittingly revealed this disturbing fact to the world. Since then, hundreds of academic studies have supported Bachelier’s findings. Unfortunately, investors pay little attention to academics and Nobel laureates.
What is the dark secret? It’s that managers don’t beat markets. In fact, markets outperform managers by a substantial margin over long periods of time. Index Funds: The 12-Step Recovery Program for Active Investors offers overwhelming proof of this and shows investors how to obtain optimal rates of return by matching their risk capacity to an appropriate risk exposure. A globally diversified portfolio of index funds is the optimal way to accomplish this.
Most investors continue to embrace an active investing strategy despite the extensive academic research demonstrating its futility. Market timing or speculating on the next winning stock, fund manager, or investment style are all akin to gambling. Below-market returns in investment portfolios and pension accounts are the result of investors gambling with their hard-earned money. This twelve-step program will put active investors on the road to recovery. Each step is designed to bring investors closer to embracing a prudent and sound strategy of buying, holding, and rebalancing an index portfolio.
Index Funds: The 12-Step Recovery Program for Active Investors is the treatment of choice for wayward investors. It has been praised by Jack Bogle, Harry Markowitz, Burton Malkiel, David Booth, Paul Samuelson, and Theodore Aronson, among others. Investment advisor Anders Oldenburg of Seligson & Company nominated the previous version as one of the three “All-Time Greatest Investment Books,” along with the writings of John Bogle and Warren Buffett.
This one-of-a-kind little jewel is an eye-pleasing manifestation of hundreds of studies and decades of research, and it clearly represents Hebner’s ongoing commitment to educate investors throughout the world. It is destined to emerge as the go-to handbook for intelligent, evidence-based investing.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781955026932
Publisher:	Ballast Books
Publication date:	12/19/2023
Pages:	402
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Mark T. Hebner, a highly regarded authority on investing, is an acclaimed author and is featured in an award-winning documentary film titled Index Funds. He also appears in the new Errol Morris documentary film titled Tune Out the Noise.
Like many investors, Hebner’s conversion to passive investing was sparked by his realization that the traditional brokerage paradigm had substantially hampered his own investment success, causing him to significantly underperform an index fund by as much as $30 million. This striking revelation served as the impetus for his tireless efforts to educate and inform investors so they can make better investment decisions.
Hebner is on a mission to change the way the world invests by replacing speculation with an education. With this in mind, he leads a team of writers, artists, graphic designers, mathematicians, statisticians, and researchers to build as well as maintain ifa.com, which is considered one of the internet’s most comprehensive and creative websites on investing. Hebner’s website, book, and documentary films elegantly set forth long-term data and research that educate and empower investors to make sound investment choices.
This special twentieth anniversary and tenth edition of Index Funds: The 12-Step Recovery Program for Active Investors includes new data and research as well as a large section on the Galton board and how it applies to the stock market.
Index Funds is arguably the most artistic and data-packed book ever written on investing. It contains more than fifty-four original oil paintings created by distinguished artist Lala Ragimov. It also includes eighty-nine color charts and graphics, many of which reflect as much as ninety-four years of stock market data. Hebner’s publisher is confident that no other book on investing has achieved this level of artistic, scientific, and articulate magnificence.
 

Editorial Reviews

Hebner gives us good advice presented in a very appealing manner. Index Funds remains one of the most valuable investment guides available.”
— Burton G. Malkiel, Ph.D., Professor of Economics at Princeton University and Author of A Random Walk Down Wall Street, Tenth Edition, 2011
 

“This is an incredibly handsome and wise book. We must be near a ‘tipping point’ of passive over active. Perhaps Hebner’s book will mark the moment.”
— John C. Bogle, Founder and Former CEO of The Vanguard Group and Author of Six Books Including The Little Book of Common Sense Investing: The Only Way to Guarantee Your Fair Share of Stock Market Returns, 2007
 

“It is really beautiful and really well done. I plan to use it as a reference guide.”
— David G. Booth, Founder and Executive Chairman of Dimensional Fund Advisors, Inc., and Benefactor of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business
 

“… as this book documents so well, a foolish attempt to beat the market and get rich quickly will make one’s broker rich and oneself much less so.”
— Harry Markowitz, Ph.D., Nobel Laureate in Economics and Professor of Economics at the University of California at San Diego, Rady School of Management

“THIS BOOK IS WONDERFUL!”
— Theodore R. Aronson, Founder of Aronson Johnson Ortiz and Institutional Investment Manager
 

“It is a valuable reference, and it benefits from many perspicacious commentaries.”
— Paul A. Samuelson, Ph.D., Nobel Laureate in Economics and Author of Inside the Economist’s Mind: Conversations with Eminent Economists, 2006

"A no-nonsense guide to disciplined investing, full of deep insights framed in compelling ways."
—Kirkus Reviews

From the Publisher

Smart, precise, and funny, Index Funds makes understanding the market sensible and even desirable.Today it’s hard to know where to turn for investment advice. Fortunately, Mark T. Hebner’s Index Funds: The 12-Step Recovery Program for Active Investors offers educated insight—with lots of research and a touch of humor—into today’s investor arena.Hebner’s 12-Step Program is meant as a way to assist people with problems. In this case it’s active investors or speculators that have tried to predict market activity to make killer returns and have lost out financially. By contrast, via his self-constructed program, Hebner shows how investing in index funds is a safer, more secure way to invest money to see realistic long-term returns.The author does not act like a guru. His information is clearly researched, right from his definition of index funds and passive investing: a strategy of investing carefully in a diversified portfolio of longstanding stocks and bonds. It makes reference and pays respect to the great money market theorists, from Friedrich von Hayek and Benjamin Graham up to Warren Buffett, Merton Miller, and Eugene Fama. He compiles studies from these famous experts, noting that active stock picking is really a finding-a-needle-in-a-haystack venture. Investors need to subject their managers to the industry T-score to see if they are good at making investment choices.Hebner also returns to a central thesis throughout the book: that no one, no matter how great his or her track record is, can truly predict market activity to pick stocks. His examination of “time picking” in step 4 shows that those that claim to pick stocks at the right time are usually riding on luck, and that truly great investing depends on, as step 9 says, analyzing “historical data over eighty years … to provide a more reliable estimate of risks and returns.”While some books on business advice and understanding marketplaces are often dry and laden with industry jargon, Hebner infuses Index Funds with easy-to-understand explanations of how to invest with index funds. The prose breaks down all the terms of investing—“riskese,” “time picking,” etc.—with short descriptions complete with helpful charts and infographics.Thanks to artist Lala Ragimov, whose renditions of Flemish Baroque and Venetian Renaissance style paintings include investor caricatures, Index Funds also has outright humor that, again, helps explain each concept chapter by chapter.Smart, precise, and funny, Index Funds makes understanding the market sensible and even desirable.

Foreword Reviews - James Burt