Larry Swedroe got an MBA with the idea that he'd manage money on Wall Street. He spent a couple of decades working for the likes of Citigroup and Prudential. "Now, I'm sort of the Antichrist to that world," he says.

Indeed, if the American public followed Swedroe's advice, armies of nattily dressed stock brokers, investment advisers and money managers would be selling apples on street corners.

Swedroe, of Town and Country, is the author of nine books on investing — two of them published just this summer, "Wise Investing Made Simpler" and "The Only Guide You'll Ever Need to the Right Financial Plan."

Their central theme: Most money managers aren't worth their fat salaries. Actively managed mutual funds are a bad deal. Small investors would do better to put their money in a mix of low-cost index funds.

"I expose the practitioners who basically admit they're frauds in their moments of honesty," says Swedroe, who is research director for Buckingham Asset Management of Clayton.

Swedroe is a leading local disciple of passive index investing, a philosophy whose patron saint is John Bogle, founder of the Vanguard mutual funds group.

The philosophy holds that the average investor can't beat the Street, even with lots of expensive help, so he shouldn't try. Investment pros have winning streaks — sometimes lasting years. But very few beat the stock and bond indexes over the long haul.

The no-brain indexes have been beating the better brains of Wall Street for most of the past decade. Standard & Poor's reports that the S&P 500 index outperformed 72 percent of actively managed large cap funds during the 2004 to 2008 market cycle. The S&P MidCap 400 index outperformed 79.1 percent of mid cap funds and S&P SmallCap 600 outperformed 85.5 percent of small cap funds. The results were similar for the 1999 to 2003 cycle, and for the crash year of 2008. Actively managed bond funds also trailed their indexes by 1 to 5 percentage points annually.

The evidence indicates that managers who beat their benchmark this year won't often repeat the feat. Swedroe cites a study showing 90 percent of equity managers underperform the indexes over 10-year periods.

Swedroe, 58, had a favorite bureaucratic tactic for explaining his own performance when he ran currency trading rooms and interest-rate risk operations. "When I got it right, I took credit for my brilliant analysis. When I got it wrong, I said that something happened that was unforeseeable — a random event. So, you're either right or unlucky."

Money managers are smart people. But their performance is weighed down by the cost of their own salaries, plus the costs of trading, staffing and marketing. They're playing against other smart investors whose bids collectively set the prices of stocks and bonds.

Given the record, Swedroe says investors are better off buying index mutual funds, which try to track the market, not beat it. Index fund expenses often run under 0.2 percent per year, compared to about 0.95 percent for all funds. The fact that they don't trade many stocks makes them fairly tax efficient.

Swedroe is a New York City native who never lost his Bronx accent. When he was born, his grandfather gave him $500 and invested it in stocks. "By the time I was 10 years old, he had me checking The Wall Street Journal to see how my stocks were doing," said Swedroe.

That set him on the way to a finance degree, and a job at Citigroup, where he ran a currency trading operation at the dawn of the derivatives business in the 1980s. He then switched to Citigroup's mortgage operation, which is based in St. Louis, then moved to Prudential Mortgage, where he was a vice chairman. When Prudential sold the business in the mid-1990s, Swedroe signed up with Buckingham.

One of his first jobs was to write a brochure explaining Buckingham's approach to investing. He wrote 40 pages, and realized he was actually writing a book.

Through a friend, he caught the attention of a publisher, who was underwhelmed. "Larry, there's a good book here, but I can't find it," the publisher told Swedroe, suggesting he team up with a skilled writer. He did so, and nine books later, he's mastered the art of getting published.

Passive investing doesn't mean picking index funds blindly, says Swedroe. You need a plan — a set allocation to stock and bond funds, cash and other investments matched both to your goals and the acid level in your stomach.

Once you have the plan, you have to stick with it, no matter what happens in the markets. When stocks go down, you buy more to keep your stock allocation at the set level. Rebalance regularly, and you'll find yourself buying when investments are cheap and selling when they're expensive.

Swedroe loves whitewater rafting. At home, he has a wall full of pictures of himself and friends bouncing down rapids, paddles flailing. He points to a picture of a woman taken seconds before a big bounce tossed her to the floor of the raft, breaking her collarbone.

Whitewater rafting involves taking a little risk for a lot of thrill. But Swedroe won't raft the Russell Fork river in Kentucky.

"It's a really beautiful place," he says. But rafters get hurt too often. To Swedroe, the thrill isn't worth the risk. To other rafters, it is.

There's a lesson in that for investors. Stocks are volatile, and the risk of another crash can be too much for some people to bear. If you'd be tempted to sell out when the market crashes, better lighten up on your stock allocation now.

Swedroe structures complicated investment plans with allocations to small caps and large, foreign stocks, domestic bonds, inflation-protected securities and the like.

Swedroe says the do-it-yourselfer can use a simpler approach to his own index portfolio using Vanguard's Total Stock Market and Total International Fund for stocks, along with an intermediate-term bond index fund inflation-protected Treasury bond fund.