i typically recommend Magic Formula Investing to people who don't want to spend a ton of time looking into/maintaining stock portfolios but want a reasonable ch

i typically recommend Magic Formula Investing to people who don't want to spend a ton of time looking into/maintaining stock portfolios but want a reasonable chance at outperformance. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Formula_Investing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Formula_Investing A lot of the literature around this, including the website sound really gimmicky, but the book itself is very well reasoned and presents a rational, easily udnerstandable case for outperformance and is backed up by historical performance. One metric i found compelling was that, over one test period, the author ranked 100 or so companies by the magic formula criteria. the top 10 performed the best, and each successively lower ranked set of 10 performed progressively worse. The author is a fairly well reputed hedge fund manager and has written a few gimmicky sounding titles, but for the most part the principles are fairly sound and compatible with general "buy and hold" investment strategies a la "intelligent investor", but rely primarily on easily attainable quantitative data and can be parsed very quickly with minimal effort.