Hey, look at the calendar. There’s only three more days left in 2015 – so get your New Year’s resolutions warmed up. What are you going to do about that flabby portfolio, that out-of-shape 401(k) plan and that uninspired estate plan? Well, today is tomorrow’s yesterday, so get to marching. We picked up four 2016 investment guides to see if any of these smart alecks had a clue.
Fortune
Led by Editor Alan Murray, Fortune has an 88-page investor’s guide that is far and away the best of show. The robust offering (the largest of any business magazine not able to fall back on profits from data terminals) gives both a macro, global view from a panel of experts but also mixes those viewpoints with industry-specific trends to picks stocks they think stand the best chance of being winners. The title picks airline stocks, Google and Microsoft over Apple, and down-beaten Volkswagen. Talented staff writer Erin Griffith has an over-the-top profile of SoftBank CEO-in-waiting Nikesh Arora. After she accompanied the successful former Google executive on a weeklong trip to India, we can understand the praise — but a little more perspective would perhaps serve the reader, and prospective investor, better. While the magazine’s early production schedule didn’t allow editors to factor in the Fed rate rise, we’ll forgive them for that.
Kiplinger
Kiplinger’s, the 68-year-old personal finance magazine, led for the last seven years by Janet Bodnar, has an uphill battle against larger rivals. Its 20-page investor’s guide is the smallest — and provides the weakest effort among its peers. Too bad. Bodnar chooses to open up the section promoting Europe as the best bet for 2016 investment — before getting to eight stocks to buy now that are better-known to US investors. The magazine also offers up five stocks to sell. It didn’t do so well last year in this area. Kiplinger’s 8 Stocks to Buy Now last year gained a puny 1.9 percent, on average. Its 5 Stocks to Sell Now in 2015 gained an average 2.7 percent. This year might prove equally harsh. It tells you to sell Chipotle Mexican Grill at $640, but the stock is already down 22 percent from that level, as of Dec. 24 — and that was before the E. coli and norovirus scare, which the magazine didn’t catch. The issue is a sincere and straightforward guide but buy it only as a second read.
Forbes
Forbes Editor Randall Lane promises readers a 2016 investment guide and, sure enough, inside, spread across 30 pages, is a section clearly listed as an investment guide. But the section is nothing more than financial p*rn and navelgazing. We guess that didn’t work as a title. Readers are offered up page after page of snippets of so-called tech gurus at private companies acting as disrupters. How does that help Main Street investors? The issue also contains a story on some gray-beard junk bond asshat raising pigs in New Jersey. And that helps out the individual investor exactly how, Randall? It’s not until 22 pages into the section that we get our first tips on investing, and it’s William Baldwin once again carrying the inflation bogeyman around on his back. Criminy. For years in Forbes there’s been this fascination with uber-wealthy folks making their way through society. It used to be a fun read. It no longer is — especially in an investment outlook issue.
Bloomberg Businessweek
No magazine today gives a better overview — the forecast from 35,000 feet — than Bloomberg Businessweek. Peter Coy, its economics editor, does a superb job of putting complex global issues into understandable context. Global growth should pick up in 2016 and interest rates should remain low (take that, Baldwin!), Coy reports, and the US should remain ahead of its peers. Because the publication can go hell’s bells on its budget (thank you, profitable terminals) and offer up a 132-page edition, it certainly is able to wrap its arms around every cough and spit of what might happen next year, but the issue is a little light on investing advice. Readers will have to wade through a lot — Russian banks facing a lot more pain, Netflix’s growing power, Microsoft wanting to be loved — to get to a little on which companies may be hot in 2016.
Time
Adele graces the cover of Time’s double issue on The Year Ahead as if she somehow represents her generation of pop stars. Time’s profile of the British singer does not reveal anything new, but simply affirms what most people think they know about her anyway. If she has a mean or self-indulgent side, Time has chosen to focus on her broad appeal, self-deprecation and unvarnished honesty, including her well-covered by everyone in the media opening remark at Radio City Music Hall in November in which she reveals how her nerves are giving her “gas.” Readers also learn that Adele struggled to come up with material for “25,” nixing motherhood and her relationship with her boyfriend as topics. “That’s when I decided to write about how I make myself feel, rather than how other people make me feel,” she says. As in its previous issue, Person of the Year, Time sidelines Donald Trump from the profiles of movers and shakers, focusing instead on Paul Ryan, the youngest Speaker in 146 years, who says Trump’s ideas are not “what this country stands for” and who is portrayed as the Republican party’s great hope for taming the unruly House.
New Yorker
SNL’s Leslie Jones gets props in The New Yorker’s Jan. 4 issue. At 46, the comedian’s career is on the rise, according to a host of her peers, including Chris Rock, who helped her to land her gig on SNL. “I mentioned her to several agents and managers over the years,” Rock tells New Yorker, adding “Leslie is the funniest woman I know.” Rock credits Lorne Michaels with seeing her potential.
New York
Forget New Year’s resolutions after reading New York’s double issue, which devotes 14 pages to where to eat in 2016, including a gourmet pub crawl. New York also gets down and dirty with strippers at Scores who describe in great detail how they justified stealing from rich male customers — “they were mostly —holes” — and how each wants to become the new version of madam Heidi Fleiss.
