An article appeared in Money magazine in May 1996 titled How to make money even if the market falls. Typical of analysts and some investors in 1996 was the belief that the market was headed for a correction. The article was not helpful then and is not helpful now heres where it goes wrong:
Recommended reducing lack of diversification by splitting money among a minimum of eight stocks in eight different industries or if the investor didnt have the capital for that approach to consider a broadly diversified mutual fund then the article recommended a bunch of losers that lost during 2000 to 2002 and that approach certainly failed in 2008.
This article was meant to sell a crummy book, none of the twelve advice points actually fulfilled the make money even if the market goes down headline on the cover and the section where the article appeared was simply titled Investment report: cutting risk but none of the points actually addressed the real harmful causes of decline, overvaluation, fraud, lack of earnings improvement, global economic slowdown and a potential lack of new players to pour money into the game to continue to raise share prices.