MARK HULBERT The value of doing nothing

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I think we as investors have to face squarely the many lessons to be drawn from this newsletter rather than try to wriggle out from under them.

One of the most profound of these lessons is that you don't always have to be doing something in your portfolio in order to make money. Indeed, I suspect, constant fine-tuning is done more for psychological reasons than rational investment reasons.

Believe it or not, in every year I have examined, the average newsletter would have been better off doing no trading and just staying with their original investments.

The average newsletter model portfolio in 2006 gained 11.35%, according to the HFD. If none of these model portfolios undertook any transaction in 2006, however, this average would have been 12.15%, or 80 basis points higher.

In terms of proportions, 53% of the newsletters would have done better by doing nothing.

Note ... calculations don't take taxes into account; if they had been, then the percentage of newsletters that would have been better off doing nothing last year grows to 72%.