Wall Street investment mixologists promote a cocktail that has broad popular appeal but which typically creates an unpleasant aftertaste in the form of bursting bubbles, market crashes, and shareholder lawsuits. Many of the most creative financial nightclubs have been fined by regulators and beaten up by angry mobs with terminal pocketbook cramps.

Sure, there are countless trading tools and information collection/analysis mechanisms that can help you prepare for the wanton unpredictability of markets; and there are tons of opportunity signaling methods, screening techniques, hedging strategies and the like that you can experiment with.

Clearly, the MPT creators were once Mutual Fund investors, looking for something better after years of disappointing investment returns. True, mutual fund managers rarely beat the markets --- but why? And also true, private, individual, portfolio managers rarely fail to beat the market averages over significant time periods.