Most investors spend their time worrying about selecting individual stocks and mutual funds: big mistake! Modern Portfolio Theory—developed in 1952 by economics Nobel Prize winner Harry Markowitz—shows that it’s more important to focus on how our securities interact as a whole. Astonishingly, most investors—including many professionals—still run their investment accounts the same way people did back when "How Much Is That Doggie In the Window" played on the Hit Parade. It’s time to apply what we’ve learned in financial economics over the past 50 years to bring your portfolio into the rock-’n-roll era.Armed with a computer, you, the investor, can use sophisticated tools to analyze your holdings—tools that would have been the envy of the biggest money managers only a decade ago. First among these is the Monte Carlo simulator: the better mousetrap that investors have been waiting for.With their trademark wit, Ben Stein and Phil DeMuth show you how your current portfolio is radically underdiversified, costing you money. They offer step-by-step instructions to supercharge it across a variety of investment situations to get you the best risk-adjusted returns.

This is a survival manual for the difficult but exciting road to retirement security.

On the heels of his very successful books, How to Ruin Your Life, How to Ruin Your Love Life, and How to Ruin Your Financial Life, Ben Stein, in collaboration with his pal Phil DeMuth, has tongue firmly in cheek once again as he comes up with surefire ways to ruin the greatest nation in the history of the human race. Try a few of these on for size: Trust the United Nations to protect us and our security. Make it unlawful to worship God or even to show images of the Ten Commandments. Convert our universities into fortresses of anti-Americanism, hatred of freedom, and centers of confusion and ignorance. Encourage contempt for the family and for the community. Allow Hollywood to brainwash us into believing that only suckers and criminals fight for their country. Treat the military, the police, firefighters, and teachers as losers and pay them starvation wages. Hey, does any of this sound familiar? Maybe that's because it's already happening! Ben and Phil give you all the information you'll ever need in order to successfully ruin the USA even further! Sardonic, humorous, but also angrily emphatic, this is a book every old-fashioned patriot really needs to read!

Praise For THE LITTLE BOOK OF ALTERNATIVE INVESTMENTS "Ben and Phil have done it again. Another lucid, insightful book, designed to enhance your wealth! In today's stock-addled cult of equities, there is a gaping hole in most investors' portfolios...the whole panoply of alternative investments that can simultaneously help us cut our risk, better hedge our inflation risk, and boost our return. This Little Book is filled with big ideas on how to make these markets and strategies a treasured part of our investing toolkit." —Robert Arnott, Chairman, Research Affiliates "I have been reading Ben Stein for thirty-five years and Phil DeMuth since he joined up with Ben ten years ago. They do solid work, and this latest is no exception." —Jim Rogers, author of A Gift to My Children "If anyone can make hedge funds sexy, Stein and DeMuth can, and they've done it with style in this engaging, instructive, and tasteful how-to guide for investing in alternatives. But you should read this Kama Sutra of investment manuals not just for the thrills, but also to learn how to avoid the hazards of promiscuous and unprotected investing." —Andrew Lo, Professor and Director, MIT Laboratory for Financial Engineering

An emotion common to humankind is fear. Fear dogs our days, makes us lose sleep, ruins our relationships, and takes the joy out of living. The strongest, best defense against that emotion is to see through the eyes of faith. As such, Ben Stein brings you 500 ways to look at life in this way so that you can triumph over fear.Ben absorbed many of the positive thoughts within these pages at 12-Step meetings he has attended, he has applied them to his own life, and he's found that they work. They're simple, but extremely effective. For example: I do not know exactly why faith and surrender work. I just know that they do work. Say it to yourself and believe it: My life is a great place to be today. I would rather be me than anyone else, and that's saying something. Life is about waking up, breaking up, shaking up, making up . . . and meditation to keep the human spirit calm. There are two forms of worship: worship of God and worship of ourselves. Guess which kind works? Taken regularly, concepts such as these will make your life easier, calmer, and definitely more enjoyable.

Life is not lived all at once—it’s lived in moments, days, months, years, and decades. This means that the financial plans and actions we all have to take to meet our responsibilities sensibly must be organized by years and decades. Ben Stein wrote the original guide to this subject almost a quarter century ago. Now, Ben, along with Phil DeMuth, the eminent financial planner and writer, have gotten together to update the book, incorporating the massive changes that have occurred in the economy in the past 25 years. This book tells you what and when to save, how much to save, what to save it in, when to spend, and when to say no to your present and yes to your future. Yes, You Can Get A Financial Life! is a time-traveling guidebook on how to organize the money side of your life for all of the decades of your life.

Economist, actor, author, and former quiz show host Ben Stein teamed up with investment psychologist Phil DeMuth to examine a century of stock market data and discovered a profound and original investment truth: Yes, you can time the market! In their instant investment classic Yes, You Can Time the Market!, Stein and DeMuth show investors simple, readily available measurements that tell them when it's time to invest in stocks, bonds, real estate, or cash. Written for the investor who wants to preserve capital and build wealth steadily, this book offers prudent, bedrock advice for anyone who can no longer afford to play games with their money.