Greenblatt, a successful investor, investment advisor, fund manager, and professor at Columbia uses a bit of a forced humorous style to hammer home a familiar message—you can’t pick individual stocks with any realistic expectation of beating the market and neither can investment advisors or mutual funds. The inability to predict future earnings, the rate of inflation and a hundred other factors makes this expectation unrealistic, so what to do? He is a committed Graham/Buffetite and goes with two fundamental rules: buy value (find an asset selling at a deep discount) and use Mr. Market’s emotional overselling and overbuying as guides. He dissects index fund ETF’s showing how a value-weighted index beats a market cap-weighted index and then he identifies several ETF’s and mutual funds in each category. He urges the investor to make two fundamental decisions: what percent allocation of your assets will go to stocks (determined by your risk tolerance, i.e. how willing are you to lose 20% of your assets vs. 40%?) and what are the upper and lower limits of this number (Plan B) to avoid jumping in when the market is going up and jumping out (too much) when the market is sinking. Good advice and easily understood.