Presumably he means a noise-laden prospectus detailing the financial instruments in use for a particular fund. If you have a money manager, are you paying him/h

Presumably he means a noise-laden prospectus detailing the financial instruments in use for a particular fund. If you have a money manager, are you paying him/her to read that paper, and it's not millions of pages. They look something like this...think of it as a set of rules for what the manager does with your money: 1) We invest you stocks/bonds rated <N> and above 2) We exit positions under <XYZ> circumstances 3) We enter positions under <ABC> circumstances 4) Past performance by following rules 1-3 is N% No one failed to read these in the past, instead they focused on the potential profit, which blinded them to the potential downside. This is an investing 101 lesson, that continues to be taught to money managers each time their profit chasing occludes their risk management. If you, a regular working class citizen, were burned by this(perhaps in your 401k), then it's worth reading the prospectus your fund manager sent you. When you see the list of funds included in your fund, you should have received a prospectus for each of those as well. Look for which funds make up the majority of your funds holdings, and read those prospectuses. If you find(and are uncomfortable with) one of those funds being a triple-leveraged ETF backed by 30-year mortgages, then you should talk to your fund manager about that.