Low to Moderate budget Investor

The trouble with most magazines is they tell you what to buy but not when to sell. Go to the public library and read some investing news letters such as NoloadFundx. Pick 2 or 3 moderate funds. Go back to the library every couple of months to see if your funds are still recommended.

Or just buy index funds.

Frank

Magazines top priorities are selling ads and, in order to keep doing so, keeping readers. Some do a pretty good job of trying to offer useful and timely advice, too, but that's not their first priority.

Before I suggest one (and I will), I recommend that you read Personal Finance for Dummies by Eric Tyson. It's an easy read, very well written and covers an enormous amount of ground pretty well, including building simple portfolios with low-cost no-load mutual funds, but also addressing other issues (ie. pay off your credit card!)

Managing your financial life from magazines - with their "what to do in 2008!" and "10 hot stocks for this and that" is a losing game. Some of that stuff is fun to read and even sometimes interesting and eductional and entertaining, but what most folks really need to do is figure out where they are (personal balance sheet), figure out where they want to be, figure out where money's coming from and where it's going, and, generally, invest in a diversified but *simple* portfolio with appropriate asset allocations which reflect their risk tolerance and their goals. Most folks just don't need to be spending a lot of time managing their portfolios - once it's set up decently, people usually add a lot more value by doing other things.

For most investors, this doesn't require any "top X for the next X!" sensational stories.

There are some excellent sample portfolios and related articles over at Merriman's Fund Advice site:

Most of their suggested portfolios require something on the order of 12 or 13 funds to replicate, which is very difficult to do unless you've got a substantial amount to invest. Until you accumulate that much, you can actually get much of the benefits of such portfolios from a simple buy-and-hold asset allocation portfolio made of as few as one (ie. via "target" or "balanced") funds or two or three if you want to fine- tune just a little bit more. (ie. a total US stock index, an international index, and a bond fund)

Some more interesting reading on simple set-it-and-forget-it kinds of portfolios may be found in Paul Farrell's columns about "lazy portfolios" - including his so-called "Margaritaville Portfolio" (from Scott Burns) which is, in fact, just three index funds, and his "second-grader's starter portfolio" (which is quite similar, but more aggressive at 90% equity 10% bonds).

Anyway, and very seriously, my first suggestion is Eric Tyson's book.

If you really want a monthly magazine, I rather like Kiplinger's. It's got some of the standard "Do This Now!" stuff, but not too much of it. And it's got some of the "check out these stocks!" stuff, too. But it's also got a good measure of the normal "real people's portfolio" and "here's a long-term plan" stuff (much of which really doesn't change over the years), as well as a nice bit of general consumer information and things like the current issue's article about great deals in public universities.

But really, read Personal Finance for Dummies and - here's the real golden tip from this over-long note - read and ask questions here in misc.invest.financial-plan. There are some very bright folks hereabouts who are very generous with their time and thoughts. (thanks, folks!)

Hi Bread,

I agree with what you say but I hope you are not confusing magazines with investment newsletters. The latter generally have several model portfolios, have periodic recommended exchanges and report their performance on a ongoing basis. Moreover they are ranked by performance by the Hulbert newsletter. They do not carry advertising.

The two I subscribe to work well for me. I don't subscribe to any magazines.

Frank

...

Nope - the OP asked for "magazine, website or publication" and I just got in my 0.02 about the magazines. Which is not to say that I don't *read* several. But I know better than to just follow their "top ten of the month" crappola. (OTOH, I have gotten a couple of good ideas from them over the years, but overall, I count them mainly as mild entertainment and/or subway reading. I miss Paul Sturm's Stockscreen column in Smartmoney, though Jack Hough's column is okay, for example).

[Newsletters]

Care to share which ones? (just curious) How timely do you get the data from them and how closely are you able to mimic the portfolios?

Are the portfolios typically all individual stock or are they ETFs/funds?

Anyway, my point was that most folks (especially "low to moderate budget investors") won't need to spend much time on portfolio management and often can get a perfectly adequate portfolio very very easily - they usually have bigger issues and places to add value to their finances than from security selection (in fact, often do much better by *not* engaging in active portfolio management much beyond simple periodic rebalancing).

I suppose I didn't answer the OP's question too well, rather I meant to explain why I don't think it was necessarily the right question. Hopefully, the OP will let us know what's going on and we can offer him or her more targeted advice.

I just do Mutual Funds and ETFs.

For my Income and Growth & Income, I follow Fidelity Monitor model portfolios. Typically I might have 1 trade every three months. I have done this for about 20 years.

For Growth, I follow NoLoadFundX Monthly Upgrader Portfolio. Trades run one or two a month. This one I have followed for about 6 years.

2007 return was 18.2% vs 5.4% for S&P 500.

My agressive portfolio relies on Fidelity Select MFs (sectors) selected via the NoLoad Fundx ranking system. 2007 return is about

30%.

Every month I review the newsletters recommendations and make the appropriate trades. I work for my money; now it must work for me.

Frank

Thanks for posting those, Frank. I just printed out the sample from one of them to look at. Some interesting long-term results. I'd like to see more details about how their volatilities have been along the way, but some interesting stuff anyway.

(My money and I are a team - we're both still working...)

That newsletter was my bible for years, but isn't it now obsolete? For one thing, it's strategy is essentially builtin to the

family, with all varieties of risk levels on offer. Rydexfundsalso has a couple such funds, and Pimco has a couple for bonds. Allthat's left for you is to set allocation of equities vs non-equitiesonce in a great while. Now back to the original question, maybe one answer would be read nothing - just shove everything into a balanced fund. Track where it falls in over time you will get familiar with alternatives to educateyourself about. BTW the expensive Fundx newsletter gave little morethan the info available on that website, only addng the simple biasweighting for most recent total return (which you can simulate byclicking on different time periods to sort by). Most US financial magazines and tv shows are shrill fluffy garbage due to being paid for mainly by advertisements. Luckily England is behind the times and still offers content for ex-colonial dollars. The Economist is a knockout world news and financial magazine, and can almost serve as the only reading matter you follow. Large, weekly and expensive... but now I follow almost every word by their podcast (about an hour a day!).

Also CNBC-Europe may come on your CATV in the wee hours, and provides tremendous macro-economic wisdom on US and world markets via calm and in-depth discussions with senior professionals. Just the thing for you to set the dial on your %equity decisions - allocation issues that they do address. Nothing like the shrill and shallow frenzy on US CNBC.