Results for 2008, Why the Barrons Roundtable is no longer valid, and Who's Managing Your Money

So the markets were in a tight range from Dec 1 - Dec 29 in the indexes, until a 5% gain on the last two days of 2008 (Dec 30-31) cut the closing losses for the indexes to 1933 levels.
The best of the indexes was the Russell 2000 down only 35%. The S&P 500 was down 38%, the Nasdaq down 42%, and the worst sector was the financials down 56%.

Fortunately we were up 7.1% but that isn't the point. The point is you should not let anyone except YOU manage your money. There are millions of Americans who watched years of wealth disappear in the span of six months and it was all avoidable. The most any of them should have lost was 17%. If the market was not a wakeup call for people to manage their own money, I'm not sure what it will take in the markets to convince them that they do not need the so-called experts telling them where to invest their money. Even in the best case scenario, a 35% loss will take almost ten years to recover from and that's assuming the investor has nine consecutive years of decent single digit percentage gains.

Fred Hickey from the Barron's Roundtable is now the only one I "read" and I would still take it with a dose of skepticism since if investing were easy, we would all by retired. It's pretty astonishing that the panel of "investment experts" had the following performance in 2008:

Fred Hickey +22% (shorted GOOG and RIMM at highs)
Oscar Schafer -13%
Felix Zulauf -18% (right about Gold, up 5%, but other picks fell)
Abby Joseph Cohen -18% (always been wrong for eight straight years)
Bill Gross -33% (the so-called bond guru wanted investors to buy Ford and GM corporate bonds, guess he was too busy selling them to realize they might be worth zero).
Meryl Witmer -33% (her one London pick FKI was up 56% but the other picks doomed)
Mario Gabelli -36% (he has always loved media but this has to hurt one's credibility)
Marc Faber -38% (the irony, he was short China but picked the wrong vehicles to implement his idea, his short FXI, and long FXP imploded on him because the instruments didn't trend in the intended direction)
Archie McAlister -62% (and why is he here, probably because they couldn't convince Peter Lynch to come back)
Art Samberg -63% (there is such a thing as being out of touch, and in this instance, this wins the last place towel)

Mental note, leveraged ETFs by ProShares and Direxion are great trading vehicles, but do not think for a second that you can hold these positions for a full year because the leverage will eat up any profits and potentially shift you into a loss situation.

Now if the above table does not convince you that YOU should be the only one to manage your money then you might as well not read any more of these posts.