JV points to a company called Sound Mind Investing that offers "biblically based investment advice".
HOW CAN SOUND MIND INVESTING BENEFIT YOU?Biblical Perspective. SMI's biblical perspective runs throughout our content. Our goals are to help you glorify God through good stewardship, and increase your ability to give. It's not just about having more, it's about having more so you can give more. ...
Superior Returns. SMI really delivers to your bottom line, paying for itself many times over. Our investing strategies have consistently outpaced the market during BOTH bull and bear periods. A recent Dalbar study concluded that the average stock investor's return was less than one-third of what the market earned between 1984-2000. Following the strategies laid out in Sound Mind Investing will keep this from happening to you, and help you exchange your investment worries for peace of mind. Are you satisfied with the recent returns from your portfolio? If not, take a moment to review our Performance History page, and see what SMI can do for you.
I've browsed the free sections of the site and I haven't really seen any Bible quotes or anything, though the brochure JV sent in the email was full of them and had some great general investment advice (I'll post a link if I can find one to the brochure on the site). Although the performance history page shows that they've been fairily successful for the past six years, as they point out themselves, most investors lose to the market over time; there's no reason to believe SMI hasn't just been lucky.
I've moved most of my money into index funds to guarantee I match the market. The efficient market hypothesis has convinced me that "it is not generally possible to make above-average returns in the stock market by trading (including market timing), except through luck or obtaining and trading on inside information." Linked to this hypothesis is another which states that the market is a random walk, and that it cannot be predicted. You can beat the market sometime, but over time the best you can do is tie.
Consider some other random processes, such as flipping a coin. If we play a game wherein I pay you a dollar each time you correctly guess the coin flip and you pay me a dollar each time you're wrong, what's your best guessing strategy? It doesn't matter -- no matter what you guess, over time we'll tie. Consider a less mechanical game like rock-paper-scissors. You can beat another human by out-guessing them, but it's impossible to beat a computer that plays RPS randomly because you have no information to use to predict their next move. Against non-random players there are plenty of losing strategies. (For lots more information about rock-paper-scissors, peruse the RoShamBo Programming Competition site.)
The best way I've heard of to beat the market is to get elected to the Senate.
The study found that during the boom years of 1993-98, a majority of US Senators were trading stocks - and beating the market by 12 percentage points a year on average. By comparison, corporate insiders beat the market by 5 percent, and typical households underperformed by 1.4 percent.Financial experts interviewed for this story say the senators' collective achievement is a statistical stunner, too big to be a mere coincidence.
