Index Investor History

From 1997 to 2011, The Index Investor provided independent analyses and insights each month on macro scenarios, asset class valuation, portfolio construction, decision making in the face of uncertainty, and downside risk management to investment managers, financial advisors, family offices, and sophisticated individual investors from around the world.

They used The Index Investor to improve their asset allocation and risk management processes, and obtain early warning of dangerous situations, such as the ones we provided ahead of the 2008 and 2000 crises. For the 15 years ended in December 2017, our model portfolios performed quite well, even if you did not heed our May 2007 warning and reduce your exposure to equity markets. You can read more about our track record here. And you can read about our core investing beliefs here.

In 2011, we suspended operations (but left our website and all our briefings and back issues up) when our key writers moved on, either to other publications, or, in the case of contributing editor Tom Coyne, to spend four years on the Good Judgment Project team, which won the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity’s forecasting tournament, with forecast accuracy that was more than 50% better than the tournament's control groups. The team's experience is described in Professor Philip Tetlock's book, “Superforecasting.”

All our back issues from 2000 to 2011 are still available for free, so that investors can continue to benefit from that content. It is a rich source of material for people who want to know what it was like to try to make sense of the tumultuous first decade of the 21st century in real time.