What an investment-newsletter watchdog has learned

[Dividend Watcher]

Over on MarketWatch, Chuck Jaffe was commenting on Mark Hulbert shutting down the Hulbert Financial Digest, a newsletter that's been around since I started investing that tracks investment newsletter performance based on their recommendations.

It was an interesting read and a few points stood out to me that we should always keep in mind:

• ... newsletters would make outrageous performance claims and investors had little to no hope of figuring out if those brags were true.
  
• The most important lesson [of the 36 years running the newsletter] is just how difficult it is to beat the market
  
• ... if you took the very select group that has beaten the market and looked at them alone going forward, you would find that most of them fail to beat the market [in the future].
  

I had come to the same conclusions a long time ago and take with a grain of salt all that I read, even over at Seeking Alpha. It behooves us to do our own research and invest on what we believe is the best place to put our money. Just as you can't time the market, you can't be right in all your own choices but over time, you should do OK with a little patience and humility.

The article is worth a read and is located here.

Thoughts?