Fiduciary Rule Fight Brews While Bad Financial Advisers Multiply
Here&#x27;s what bothers me. Ten years ago I was still in school and came across Malkiel&#x27;s &#x27;A Random Walk&#x27; book. Then I started reading Graham&#x27;s &#x27;Intelligent Investor&#x27; and was like &quot;dude I&#x27;m not going to spend hours a day trying to potentially beat the market by 2%. lol I&#x27;m not Peter Lynch&quot;.  I concluded that if I wanted to park my money somewhere, it would be all in Vanguard index funds.<p>Now, it&#x27;s 2017, and everyone has the hots for these products. Feels like a bubble. I&#x27;ve always had this possibly irrational feeling that if everyone is recommending something, I should probably look into alternatives. Since I graduated and started working in 2010 all my dollars went into rental real estate, but recently I get jealous of how low-maintenance (mentally) having these shares of index funds is, and I dream about getting qualified dividend income and capital gains.<p>Can anyone offer a viewpoint on this? Am I being irrational? All my life I&#x27;ve been doing stuff differently from everyone and it&#x27;s worked out pretty well. Meanwhile had I started buying up these funds I&#x27;d probably have the same exact networth as I do now. What other passive options are out there? Dividend aristocrats? I also entertained buying AAPL and Wells Fargo and 3M and putting the rest in a Vanguard small cap index. <i>shrugs</i>