The Idle Investor

3 simple strategies to earn high returns and beat the professionals

Would you like to use a simple, low-risk investing system that beats market indexes and fund manager performance over the long term, but requires only a few minutes of your time each month? Does it sound like a lot of hard work? It's not - even the laziest investor can achieve it.

The Idle Investor includes three straightforward DIY strategies for long-term investing. All you have to do is follow the simple rules. Each method requires only a limited amount of your time and they all make use of easily accessible, low-cost funds. The reasons why the strategies work and everything else you need to know to put them into practice is explained clearly, with numerous worked examples.

The three strategies are:

1. The Bone Idle Strategy: Part of your portfolio is allocated to shares and part is allocated to bonds, with adjustments only required twice a year. The rest of the time you do nothing.

2. The Summer Hibernation Strategy: For part of the year your portfolio is allocated to shares and for part of the year it is allocated to bonds. Once again, adjustments to the portfolio are only required twice per year. The rest of the time you do nothing.

3. Multi-Asset Trending Strategy: A simple trend-following method determines whether to hold your portfolio in shares or bonds. For this strategy you will need to check your investments and make adjustments once a month.

Even on the very few occasions each year when action is required - twice a year for strategies 1 and 2, and once a month for strategy 3 - you'll only spend a few minutes checking your portfolio and making simple changes. The activity levels range from yearly rebalancing, for the laziest investor, through to monthly reallocation, for those who are more active. How much you do depends on how lazy you are feeling.

Testing the three Idle Investor strategies for the period 1990 to 2012 resulted in average annual returns of up to 28%. Compare this to a buy-and-hold approach of investing in UK shares, which would have delivered 8.5% per year over the same period, and you can see that being idle doesn't mean being unsuccessful!

If you are looking for a straightforward investing method that lets you get on with your life while your money grows in the background, then become an Idle Investor.