On a plane recently, my wife was getting trounced while playing an in-flight trivia game. You play against other passengers using screen names, like that of her nemesis J-DOGG. The quicker you log your answer, the more points you get. I noticed that the score display also listed the seat numbers of our foes. Turns out J-DOGG was sitting in the row in front of us—and was our 10-year-old son Joshua.

His winning method? He didn't read any questions or answers. He simply answered "C" every time, as fast as he could. Brilliant! Just by random chance he should get five of 20 questions, worth 3,000 points. The J-DOGG method actually worked a little better than that.

On a later flight, I tried the J-DOGG method. I walked off that plane with some valuable reminders and a story that helps communicate them to clients. Intellectually, I knew my son's method was sound. It didn't guarantee me a win, but the odds of being competitive were great. Even so, it wasn't as easy to implement as it sounds. I made the mistake of paying attention to the questions after missing an easy one. Almost immediately, I tried to tweak the strategy by at least glancing at the question to avoid getting zero points on an easy one and losing ground against most of the plane. My effort eroded the effectiveness of the strategy. There seems to be a lot of that going on at advisory practices today.

ON THE BANDWAGON

True or false? If you take a buy-and-hold approach, when the stock market goes down, your stock portfolio won't go down or will go down dramatically less. Most FP readers will answer "false" to that question and would have answered the same at the market's peak in 2007. Yet, everywhere I turn, I read that the market's drop justifies major changes in advisors' approach to the markets. Advisors are rethinking what they are doing, and many have lost faith in traditional strategies like buy-and-hold.

I'm in favor of reexamining methods and underlying assumptions. Thoroughly examining events and actions makes sense, but abandoning buy-and-hold, as I understand it, is not a logical consequence of examining the panic of 2008. Maybe it's my understanding of buy-and-hold that's the problem.

For more than 20 years, I thought buy-and-hold meant that if you buy and maintain a well-diversified portfolio of stocks over a long period of time, rebalancing systematically, your odds of realizing a positive after-tax, after-inflation return are good, despite the many negative periods you will encounter along the way. No guarantees, no delusions of smooth sailing, just markets that bounce around often and dramatically and usually end up higher. The longer the time frame, the better the odds of success.

This definition seemed pretty good to us. Nonetheless, given the events that unfolded, we reconsidered the whole notion of buy-and-hold. Alternatives fell into four categories-time the market, be more active traders, be less diversified or buy alternatives to stocks.

* Time the market. I hate those ubiquitous charts showing what happens if you miss the 10 best days in a certain period. They make the point that markets can move quickly, but they're flawed since no responsible advisor invests that way. This same flaw afflicts critics who point out long stretches of time where little, if any, money was made in stocks and suggest that since times are unusual, a similar fate awaits.

One of their favorite statistics is that the Dow was at 1,000 at the beginning of 1966 and was still at 1,000 in early 1981. If you can find someone who only invested in the 30 Dow stocks over that period, I doubt they refused the dividends (which the stat ignores), and they would not describe that time as "flat" or otherwise uneventful.

The best evidence that market timing is a bad idea is the market's recent behavior. Very few people predicted the crisis. Of those that did, many had been predicting it for years. Fund manager Peter Lynch famously said, "Far more money has been lost by investors preparing for corrections or anticipating corrections than has been lost in the corrections themselves."

* Be more active. Most planners aren't fond of market timing, but many get sucked into being more active traders. "It's a stock-picker's market," they say. Trouble is, it's impossible to buy or sell a security without someone taking the opposite action. In the aggregate, traders lose out to steadier long-term participants because of costs the traders incur acting on their ideas.

* Be less diversified. A few planners want to invest in only their best ideas or use managers that likewise concentrate their holdings. But the median U.S. stock lost 52.7% in 2008. Those best ideas better be great because the ones that aren't will cream you. Diversification means you don't suffer badly from unsystematic risks; it doesn't mean you eliminate risk altogether.