John C. Bogle’s The Little Publication of Index Trading can be a power-packed description of why outperforming the marketplace is an trader illusion. Instead, the founder of The Vanguard Group-the guy who’s been known as ‘the conscience of the expenditure industry’*-recommends a straightforward, time-tested investment strategy that may deliver the best return to the greatest quantity of investors: indexing. Why? Trading is certainly a zero-sum video game where transaction costs, taxes, poor investment diversification, and poor market-timing (an affliction for most investors) hurts your portfolio more than it can help. Indexing eliminates that harm. Bottom-line, if you cannot become an index, why not spend money on one? And you’ll be all the more happy and richer for it.

*Time Magazine