When I saw the cover of this book, with Ben Stein and his co-author lounging by the pool, bags of gold coins and gold ingots at their side, I thought it would be a send-up of investing books. Oops.

In spite of the kicky title and irreverent writing style, this is a genuine attempt to educate investors. It's full of rather conservative, long-term advice. Look for undervalued stocks. Don't jump in and out of the market. Diversify. When Stein and DeMuth talk about Market Timing, it is not a reference to day trading, rather to buying stocks when they are cheap. Buy low, in other words.

Their thinking on dollar cost averaging is refreshingly sensible. Instead of the Bob Brinker style of investing a fixed amount every month (or year or whatever) regardless of cost per unit, you should wait until the stock is cheap, then buy as much as you can. This assumes the investor has a brain, and enough discipline not to mess it up, which seems to be Brinker's fear.

Anyway, there isn't much new here. It's solid investing advice, breezily presented, so if you need a refresher, or are new to investing, this isn't a bad book to start with.

Finally, at last, a book about the financial market that combines great advice with true wit and common sense. I've bought it for everyone I know. (Including my three year old son... A must for every Mom who'se thought about entering the market, but has never quite felt able to trust it before. With these chaps you're in safe, informative, entertaining hands. Alison Larkin

This is not a book for traders, but for long-term investors. With wit and wisdom, Stein and Demuth prove their point: long-term investors must pay attention to market cycles. If you buy when the market is high, you are all but guaranteed to wind up under water. You could be buying the best company in the world--it does not matter. Pay too much, and you'll be burned.
The investors of the 90s forgot about market-timing.Wall Street told them it didn't matter, and they followed that advice-- to their eternal regret. As another reviewer has pointed out, Wall Street's salesmen want to sell stocks now. Caveat emptor if you pay too much.
Maggie Mahar's "Bull! A History of the Boom, 1982-1999: What Drove the Breackneck Market and What Every Investor Needs to Know About Financial Cycles" fleshes out the story and gives investors some sound advice on what to do next. Read both books.

The stupendous collapse of the NASDAQ is still fresh in many people's minds. This book offers a way to systematically avoid such euphoria in the future.

Simply put, they advocate buying only when key indicators (such as price to earnings or price to book ratios) fall below their 15-year moving average. When such indicators are higher than their 15-year moving average, stay on the sidelines with Treasuries. Ample evidence is supplied to show how this approach would have netted a hypothetical investor much more than conventional dollar-cost-averaging over the past 100 years.

However, some big flaws lurk in the margins that are not addressed. By utilizing a 15-year moving average, they have effectively reduced the number of unique supportive data samples to 7. There are only seven 15-year windows within their 100 year research period. It is true that they utilize a moving average, thus generating an infinite number of 15-year averages, but the point is that the 15-year average of the years 1970-1984 is not fundamentally independent from the 15-year average of the years 1971-1985 because they share 14 years worth of data. Only the windows 1945-1969 and 1970-1984 are actually unique 15-year data windows. So the question is, do you trust an experiment based on only 7 data points?

The other larger and more substantial flaw is that the strategy proposed by the authors is stained by the same flaw as every other simple and mechanical investment strategy: it uses a strategy perfected through data mining. That is, their ultimate strategy recommendation was selected from a field of nominated strategies and the assumption is made that what worked best in the past will work for the future. This is a classic academic's assumption flaw that has been repeatedly highlighted by the failure of other back-tested strategies such as the once popular "Dogs of the Dow" strategy. Many simple mechanical investment strategies have been invented over the decades and none has ever stood the test of time. I do not see a reason why this strategy will be different.

That said, this book is useful for the nuggets of healthy skepticism that everyone should adopt towards any investing endeavor.

Okay, we all know Ben Stein is a smart guy from Win Ben Stein's Money. What I did not know was that he and apparently his co-author Phil DeMuth know a fantastic amount about investing. He has studied it at Yale and Columbia and been a major commentator about it in Barrons for twenty years. The results are impressive. This is a book about investing for the long term, and it makes total sense. It says not to base your buys on fads and chat rooms or day trading gambles, but to use the basics of earnings, dividends, book value, sales,and long term price trends
to find out whether stocks are cheap or expensive, and what your prospects are for major long term gains based on historical criteria, not on guesswork.

If I had known this stuff I would never have gotten caught in the bursting of the bubble in 2000 and with it, I will never get caught with my pants down again.

If I had to recommend only one book to long term investors, it would be Yes, You Can Time The Market. I think the people who gave it bad reviews must be day traders looking for the next bubble. This book is not for them. Yes, You Can Time The Market is for serious investors who want to make money without taking insane risks. get it and grow rich slowly but surely.