I’m surrounded by fabulous people.
I can’t imagine life without Doris Michaels, the only agent I’ve ever had. I was one of her first clients, and I’ll be one of her last. It’s a joy to still work together after all these years, and to see her and her incomparable husband, Charlie, on every trip to New York.
My editor at Plume, Kate Napolitano, worked with me on The Neatest Little Guide to Stock Market Investing. At lunch one December day just before the fifth edition debuted, she listened to my impassioned speech about a game-changing new way for people to invest using just two index funds and what I called “the 3 percent signal”—and here we are. She was there when it began and walked every step of the way with me.
Many researchers contributed to the body of work that helped me create the plan, but in this limited space I’ll mention just three. Behavioral psychologist Daniel Kahneman showed me why stock market success eludes people, and the value of following a formula. In the formula department, I’m indebted to Michael Edleson’s value-averaging concept of rebalancing to a fixed performance goal. John Bogle at Vanguard has been a tireless champion of index fund investing for the past four decades, and such low-cost funds are all that the 3 percent signal needs. Thank you, gentlemen. I wish there were more like you on Wall Street.
A special thank-you to Roger Crandell, whom I first met when he subscribed to The Kelly Letter but who later became a friend and research collaborator. His expert coding provided many of the historical plan results presented in this book, and his software double-checked output from my spreadsheets. You would be amazed at the volume of data crunching necessary to present what appear to be simple conclusions. Roger made this task easier for me.
Finally, thanks to Fidelity, the Investment Company Institute, Morningstar, Standard & Poor’s, Vanguard, and Yahoo! Finance for supplying me with information.