Forbes: Fire Your Stock Broker?!

Ok, yes, it’s funny that I’m writing about buying and selling stocks.  Mr. Anti-Crony Capitalist.

It’s not that I have a problem with making money.  It’s how it’s done and upon whose backs it’s done upon.

Anyway, I am a Wall Street Journal subscriber and a former dead tree edition subscriber to Forbes.  I still get Forbes’ emails though.  Got to keep an eye on the capitalist class, know what I mean?

With a father who is a very active and successful investor (does it all himself, no broker, thank you), I thought this excerpt from a recent Forbes newsletter was interesting.  Apparently there is a gizmo that can pick stocks far better than a human.

Can Our Machine Really Pick Better Stocks Than Your Broker?

Dear Investor: Some futurists predict that machines are getting so smart, they soon will leave humans in the dust.. I think it’s already happening…

IBM’s Deep Blue beat human world champion Garry Kasparov at chess. Now, a proprietary computer software program – the “Quant Model” – is quietly outperforming most human portfolio managers at stock picking … as incredible as that sounds.

You’ve heard it said that more than 75% of portfolio managers under-perform the market, right? Well, during a 10-year period, the Quant Model outperformed the S&P 500 by a staggering 362% — beating the pants off most professional money managers by a country mile!

That means if you’d bought the stocks our Quant Model identified, you’d be more than 4 ½ times richer than your friends and neighbors who put their money in an S&P 500 index fund. . . .

Now, if I only had a spare $100,000 laying around to invest!