Investment advice from a dying banker

Gordon Murray, a former managing director at Lehman Brothers and Credit Suisse, didn't have any bucket lists when he elected to stop treatment for brain cancer. Instead, he wrote a book, with the help of his friend Daniel Goldie, on the basics of investing - and which runs counter to much of what he did on Wall Street. From the NYT:

The mere fact that Mr. Murray felt compelled to write it is itself a remarkable story of an almost willful ignorance of the futility of active money management -- and how he finally stumbled upon a better way of investing. Mr. Murray now stands as one the highest-ranking Wall Street veterans to take back much of what he and his colleagues worked for during their careers.

Among the steps he urges readers to take:

--Hire a financial adviser who earns fees only from you and not from mutual funds or insurance companies.

--Divide your money among stocks and bonds, big and small, and value and growth.

--Subdivide between foreign and domestic (American stocks' share of the overall global equities market keeps falling).

--Decide whether to invest in active or passively managed mutual funds (he goes for passive, since no one can predict the future with any regularity).

--Rebalance by selling your winners and buying more of the losers.

As Ron Lieber notes in the piece, "This is not new, nor is it rocket science. But Mr. Murray spent 25 years on Wall Street without having any idea how to invest like a grown-up. So it's no surprise that most of America still doesn't either."