The best investment newsletters are the average investor's best friend. Period. These investment newsletters have guided readers to market-beating returns over two to three decades, and thus have far outperformed most stock and bond mutual funds and many financial advisors (who advise you to put money in mutual funds anyway).

Some of the characteristics of the best investment newsletters and their editors are:

• Long years of market experience which has given them a feel for the market
• A system for picking stocks, bonds and other securities which has been developed over time and to which they stick
• Multiple tools to guide them through the market's twists and turns
• Sharing the portfolio and tracking its returns, giving buy and sell signals suitably

Some of the best investment newsletters actually help you with asset allocation, portfolio management and so forth, while others eschew that responsibility, leaving it to you to choose how to manage your own portfolio. This article shows some of the common mistakes made by subscribers to investment newsletters and why one should avoid them to maximize one's benefits.

Hulbert Financial Digest does a good job of rating the portfolio of multiple newsletters over time, and their top 10-25 list tends to surface some of the best investment newsletters out there. However, don't rely purely on their ranking - since many times, when you are led towards a fresh bull market, it is up to you to take maximum advantage of it by fishing for stocks that have not been recommended, and by overloading on stocks entering a bull run. Many investors gain outsized returns through these means, and that is not reflected in the rankings done by the Digest.

Our recommendation for the best newsletter to identify new bull markets would be The Dines Letter, edited by James Dines. The editor and newsletter fits the criteria we mentioned above, plus it specializes in guiding you towards fresh bull markets that have a decade or so to run. It is entirely up to you to manage your portfolio and take advantage of the bull run; moving money from a current leader to a new leader within the industry even as the bull market unfolds. This letter has been in the market for over thirty years, and has a strong track record through most of it.

The editor often includes articles that reach beyond the markets (health, terrorism, environment), but most importantly, he is a teacher. He freely shares his tools with all of us, so that we might learn the techniques for ourselves.

There are many outstanding investment newsletters out there, but you will not go wrong in making this choice.