Ask Ben Stein if the war in Iraq has been good or bad for the economy and he hedges. "I don't know," he says, "but if we didn't have the war, someday Saddam Hussein would have gotten the atom bomb and detonated it in New York or Los Angeles. That would have been very, very bad for the economy."

With a net worth in the "low eight figures, although some days it's a high seven-figure amount," Stein's personal economic numbers certainly add up. He amassed his fortune through astute investing and jobs as diverse as economist, trial lawyer, presidential speechwriter, Wall Street Journal reporter and, most famously, as an actor/TV personality ranging from Ferris Bueller's Day Off to the Comedy Central game show Win Ben Stein's Money.

Now Stein has teamed with investment advisor Phil DeMuth to write Yes, You Can Time the Market, a book aimed at slaughtering a sacred cow of investing. "Phil and I had long discussions about whether it was possible for the market to be appropriately priced during the bubble," Stein says, "and I kept saying, 'It's way too high.' The brokers of course were saying price-to-earnings didn't mean anything. Luckily, I believed in myself and I sold a fair amount before the crash."

For their book, the authors studied a century's worth of stock market data to develop measurements that reveal when to buy stocks, bonds or real estate and when to stay liquid. "We found that it's very much better to buy at certain times," Stein explains, "so we were prompted to give people an idea of when is a good time to buy by historical standards." They turned their findings into an easy-to-follow book focused on their market philosophy. To keep up with the ever-changing market, Stein and DeMuth launched a companion website, www.yesyoucantimethemarket.com, which helps users decide whether or not it's time to buy. We asked Stein and DeMuth for some simple principles for young investors on how to play the market.

Be an investor, not a gambler.
If you overhear a stock tip in the locker room or get a red-hot lead from your sister's friend's boyfriend, don't be tempted. "The savvier young person will be content to earn the rate of return that occurs to the stock market as a whole [rather than buying an individual stock], which he could get by buying an S&P index fund," DeMuth says. "He'd be really smart if he bought that index fund when our book says to buy it." Stein cautions: "It's pretty expensive right now."

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