BEATING THE MARKET

A favorite new-year question for many investors is whether the markets will go up or down over the next 12 months. The answer is easy: No one knows.

But most people don’t like to hear that truthful good sense, as the personal-finance columnist Jonathan Clements has found out to his dismay. He told about it in his Wall Street Journal column “Getting Going,” which appears in the Saturday-Sunday issue of the Bangor Daily News.

His standard message warns against all sorts of uncertainty. But every time he opens his mail he finds that many investors, far from being uncertain, are pretty sure of themselves – and pretty sure that Mr. Clements is an idiot. They denounce him in the nasty and profane language that often goes with e-mail.

They take offense when he warns against “market timing,” buying and selling frequently in an effort to beat the market. He raises two objections to the common practice. First, the trading commissions enrich the brokers and cost the investors. Second, it often reduces portfolio value rather than increasing it, since a stock or mutual fund that has been going up may soon go down. Chasing a winner often means buying a likely loser. Of course, promotional ads always have to say that share values can go down as well as up and that past performance is no guarantee of future performance. That advice, sometimes in tiny print, should really appear in a bold headline.

He also warns that managed funds, by and large, don’t match the index funds that copy a given segment or the entire market, while management costs can reduce earnings by as much as 2 or 3 percent.

A new book by Daniel R. Solin, “The Smartest Investment Book You’ll Ever Read” (Penguin Group, 2006), makes a similar case. Mr. Solin, a securities arbitration lawyer and registered investment advisor, mentions Mr. Clements and Jane Bryant Quinn, another financial columnist, as rare exceptions in the financial media, which puts out “nothing more than hype, masquerading as critical information that Hyperactive Investors must absorb in their quest to beat the markets.”

Sad to say, the few who offer such warnings risk the fate suffered by Cassandra, who was locked up as a madwoman because she warned the Trojans about the Greek invaders’ wooden horse. Today’s traders mostly hear about the big winners and disregard the many losers. Hedge funds, with their reported huge earnings, have attracted many wealthy investors, but their proliferation and their hefty commissions (typically 1 to 2 percent of funds managed plus 20 percent of any profits) have dragged down their performance. Most of them now lag behind the indexes, and many have gone out of business.

Gambling on the securities markets has much the same allure as playing the slot machines or the lottery. Both offer the hope of big winnings. But with the markets the hope can go on and on, while most other gamblers know that in the long run they will lose.