Idiotic Investing: The Ron “Ronco” Popeil Strategy

It is called Lazy Portfolios and has to be one of the most ridiculous investment strategies that has ever been invented. Unless it is specifically used to help offset capital gains, I cannot understand how this is something that hasn’t been laughed off the planet.ronco

How can anyone, even in the best of times, believe that simply throwing money into a few funds and forgetting about them is prudent? For goodness sake, it sounds like the Ron “Ronco” Popeil: SET-IT-AND FORGET-IT strategy of investing.

Remember the infomercial that plugged a simple cooking process that was billed as “easy and foolproof?” If I remember correctly, the process was best for turkeys, just like Lazy Portfolios.

Mad-Money-Machine has this posted :

The following table shows the Lazy Portfolios from the “Investment Professionals” followed by the individual entries in the Lazy Portfolio Smackdown Game. They are sorted by YTD return from 31 Dec 2007 thru end of 2008. I calculated the standard deviations and Sharpe Ratios on the portfolios using a spreadsheet and Yahoo! historical quotes.   To see the contents of each portfolio, cross-reference the ID number in the first column with the sorted list on this page.

(Click to enlarge to see this mess zoomed in really close)

madmoneylazy

If you need to see how bad it gets, there are many more portfolios HERE. What is the point of standard deviation in this table? Is it shown over one year and in what context? No matter what statistics you use, it is still awful. Losses are losses…..Sorry Paul.

Am I being too tough on this or is about time that someone outed this farce ?

Check out how we think investing should be done with the TDI Managed Growth Strategy HERE.