This week, I'm going to share my thoughts about a couple of the recent investment-related articles I have read. The first article documents the day in February when the stock markets hit the milestone of having fallen 50% from their October 2007 peaks. Of course, this means that index investors will now have to earn 100% or greater returns just to get their accounts back to break-even. I'll also note how market action since that article has now taken the major market indexes even deeper into the red. The market's action over the past eighteen months or so highlights my frequent advice to include investments that employ active money management strategies in your overall portfolio. While there are obviously no guarantees, the ability to move to cash or hedge long positions can potentially help to minimize losses, especially during bear markets. This brings us to the second article. Many large mutual fund and brokerage companies have a vested interest in seeing discredited buy-and-hold strategies continue. Thus, it was not a surprise when I learned of a study sponsored by a major mutual fund company that supposedly showed the superiority of buy-and-hold over the active strategy of market timing - even in this bear market! It was also no surprise that the study was based on flawed assumptions that skewed the results in favor of buy-and-hold. I was surprised, however, that the Investor's Business Daily publication reported on the flawed study as if it were legitimate advice. In the E-letter, I'll point out how the mutual fund study was fatally flawed, and hopefully show you how to avoid taking such articles and studies at face value, even when they are published by seemingly legitimate sources....