The provocative title of this article is designed to get your attention. The article itself is designed to open your eyes to the trash that’s routinely peddled by Wall Street and much of the financial media.

We define “investment pornography” as misleading sales pitches meant to excite investors and goad them into enriching other people, contrary to their own best interests.

If you believe many TV shows, financial publications and investment newsletters, you think “the best investments” must change every time there’s a new issue or a new show. Phooey!

Here’s the inside scoop: Much of what passes for financial journalism is really just entertainment designed to sell advertising, not make you money. Even worse, promotional material from investment newsletters is designed to take your money directly. That literature often claims outlandish, unbelievable returns. Much of it is just fiction, protected by the First Amendment.

Except for dumb luck, there are no shortcuts to achieving wealth. But hope is always in demand, and there will always be plenty of people happy to sell it to you at whatever price they can get you to pay.

The best tool to protect yourself from investment pornography is your wastebasket. The old advice to “investigate before you invest” packs a lot of wisdom into just four words.

Your next best tool is a lot of skepticism about the enticing things you read.

“Eight stock market gems just begging to be snatched up by investors,” claimed a cover headline in Kiplinger’s Personal Finance in February 2000. Eleven months later, half of those stocks, all touted as being extremely cheap, are much cheaper, including one that’s down 64 percent.

Here’s another example:

In its December 1999 issue, Money Magazine outlined “The Sensible Internet Portfolio,” a strategy “that tries to dampen risk while positioning you to gain from the Web’s blazing growth.” You can be the judge of that. Money’s recommendations, followed by their 2000 performance, were a single mutual fund and “five stocks to buy now:” Munder NetNet Fund, down 54 percent; Safeguard Scientifics, down 87 percent; Exodus, down 55 percent; Inkomi, down 80 percent; VeriSign, down 61 percent; EarthWeb, down 85 percent; and Ariba, down 39 percent.

(To its credit, Money recommended that this portfolio make up no more than 4 percent of a portfolio, even for an aggressive investor.)

And still another example:

In cover headlines on its August 1998 issue, Worth Magazine promised “BEAT THE S&P With Our Five Top-Ranked Funds.” Most of the magazine was devoted to forecasting how hundreds of mutual funds would perform between then and the year 2001.

Now that year has arrived, and it’s time to see if Worth’s top-ranked funds, one in each of five categories, really beat the Standard & Poor's 500 Index and how they stacked up against their peers.

In the performance calculations below, we used Morningstar data to calculate the growth of $10,000 during the nine quarters starting October 1, 1998 and ending December 31, 2000. In that period, $10,000 invested in the Standard & Poor's 500 Index grew to $13,363. We compare each one with a low-cost Vanguard alternative.

Among small-company value funds Worth picked Eclipse Equity, now named Eclipse Small Cap Value; $10,000 grew to $10,515 in Eclipse and to $14,325 in Vanguard Small-Cap Value Index Fund.

Among small-company growth funds, Worth picked Baron Asset; $10,000 grew to $14,780 in Baron Asset and to $13,992 in Vanguard Small-Cap Index Fund.

Among large-company value funds, Worth picked Vanguard Windsor II; $10,000 grew to $12,655 in Windsor II and to $14,038 in Vanguard Value Index Fund.

Among large-company growth funds, Worth picked MFS Massachusetts Investors Growth Stock; $10,000 grew to $18,680 in MFS Massachusetts and to $12,490 in Vanguard Growth Index Fund.

Among global funds, Worth picked GAM International; $10,000 shrank to $8,473 in GAM International and grew to $14,805 in Vanguard Global Equity Fund.

The “promise” of this article was that these five funds would beat the S&P 500 Index in the following nine quarters. Two did, but the others underperformed.

Failing to recognize it was compounding the damage done by picking five funds to beat the market, Worth went farther. The magazine recommended portfolio weightings of 27 percent each in Vanguard Windsor II and GAM International, 19 percent in Eclipse Small Cap Value, 16 percent in MFS Massachusetts Investors Growth Stock and 11 percent in Baron Asset. The three biggest components of its suggested portfolio were the very three that underperformed the market. Your $10,000 invested in Worth’s suggested portfolio on October 1, 1998 would have grown to $12,317, compared with $13,363 if you had invested the Standard & Poor's 500 Index.

It’s not hard to guess the criteria that led to Worth’s picks: Each of these five funds had blistering performance, averaging nearly 50 percent, in the 12 months immediately preceding Worth’s preparation of the article. Each fund had smart managers and a compelling rationale for why it would be a market-beater.

In three of the five fund categories, the comparable Vanguard index fund (Vanguard Global Equity Fund, Vanguard Value Index and Vanguard Small Cap Value Index) beat both the S&P 500 Index and Worth’s pick. This is further testimony to support something we’ve said many times: Vanguard index funds can be an investor’s best friend.