EDITOR’S NOTE:  Why don’t many of the brightest people on Wall Street, and the people who take their advice, succeed in beating the market? And, why are exchange traded funds, with all their low-cost advantages, a dangerous thing for many investors? 

EDITOR’S NOTE:  Wall Street is filled with highly paid and highly educated workaholics focused on beating the market. Many of them publish newsletters with specific advice, but more often than not, that advice doesn’t do the job. Why? 

Lots of people talk about buying and holding as the best investment approach. But not all of them practice buying and holding as I see it. Here are some thoughts I shared recently with listeners on a Sound Investing podcast. For convenience, I’ve organized this as a list of 10 ideas, but many of them affect each other, and sometimes one blends into another.

As investors were suffering huge losses last year and the first few months of this year, many of them despaired that good times would ever return. We never doubted that the market would come back, but we had (and still have) no way to know what a full recovery might look like or how long it might last. However, the history of the U.S. stock market is at least somewhat encouraging.