I’m Richard E. Evans, investment author and analyst. My mission is to show you what hard evidence says is the most effective way to invest. In fact, it’s a way that typically outperforms Wall Street.

By “outperform Wall Street,” I mean doing better than the fund jockeys who run actively managed funds, and the private wealth managers who select individual stocks and bonds. My focus is on long-term investors, not fast-buck traders. Along the way, I’ll comment on developing investment news.

The Smartest Way to Invest is the title of my latest book and also the name of this blog. Both are written for anyone with money in the stock and bond markets. That includes corporate, government, and educational employees, business owners, and people with a private portfolio. Drawing from that book (see link below), we see that most people with money in the markets do not realize three critical facts:

1. A broad or total market index fund offers a way to earn a return that will necessarily match the return of its relevant stock or bond index, minus a very small amount. That’s why I say the return, relative to the total market, is guaranteed. It will always be within a tiny fraction of the total market.

2. That return–from an S&P 500 index fund or, for example, Vanguard’s Total Stock Market index fund–routinely outperforms 65% to over 80% of actively managed funds–and by logical extension, a similar percentage of actively managed private portfolios. (There is no reason to believe private portfolio managers are any better at predicting the future than mutual fund managers.)

3. You can’t reliably get around those two facts by owning only actively managed funds that seem to have outperformed their index. Study after study has shown that outperformance strongly tends to fade. Funds that beat the market in the recent past often–in fact, almost always–lag a relevant index fund in the next quarter, or the next year.

Those three points–the guaranteed return of total market funds, their strong performance, and the futility of buying past winners–are the key facts behind my approach to long-term investing. There’s a lot more about this approach in my latest book, now on Amazon.com. Here’s a handy link The Smartest Way to Invest.