One thing I have noticed repeatedly over the years about successful investors is that they have a clear sense of their goals and how they are going to reach those goals. But investors who are confused about what they are doing experience stress, uncertainty and emotional strains that sometimes lead them into decisions that are, at best, unproductive-and often disastrous.

I think the most interesting part of the investment industry is the psychology involved, and I’m always looking for new ways to communicate about this. Investors who follow market-timing disciplines know how difficult it is to overcome the psychological hurdles. It’s especially challenging to ignore the media's constant advice to pursue short-term results and trends, while the media advocates long-term investing. You can rarely pick up a financial magazine these days without reading cover headlines promising to tell you which mutual funds or stocks you should be buying RIGHT NOW.

A simple test may reveal what kind of investor you are. If you know that, you’ll have a much better chance of resisting Wall Street’s misleading siren songs – and the market’s emotional roller-coaster. You’ll find the test and some analysis in this article.

Sidebar to: In Stock Investing, Size Matters

In the stock market, "large-cap" and "small-cap" are insiders’ shorthand for a simple bit of mathematics that tells the overall value that investors place on various public companies.

John Bogle, founder and retired chairman at Vanguard Group, has done a great deal for individual investors over the past 30 years.

Market timing is one of the least understood concepts involved in investing money. It’s time we identify and debunk some of the myths about market timing. These myths seem to take on a life of their own through repetition. But anybody interested in market timing deserves to know the truth, and this seems like the perfect time for a refresher course.

Conventional wisdom says trying to time the stock market is a fool’s game. And if you look at market timing very narrowly, defining it as a discipline that nobody really practices, then the conventional wisdom is right.

We’ve been managing money for clients since 1983, and the best way we have ever found to build a buy-and-hold portfolio is using no-load asset-class index funds managed by Dimensional Fund Advisors (DFA). These funds were created to help investors pinpoint the most productive types of assets, as identified in academic research.