Investors and financial advisors would have a much less complicated time of it if they could follow what we will call the Tao of Dee, as described by Gary Antonacci in his absorbing new book, Dual Momentum Investing. An Innovative Strategy for Higher Returns With Lower Risk.

“The best investor I know -- one who has outperformed all the professional money managers I’m familiar with -- is my wife, Dee,’’ said Bob Topol, then-the highly successful head of Smith Barney’s OTC department.

It was 1971, and Dee Topol, a patriotic citizen, invested only in stocks with U.S., American, or general -- she admired Gen. Eisenhower -- in their names (from American Electric Power to General Mills, and so on).

“I kept asking myself how Dee could have outperformed the world’s best money managers for so long with such a naïve strategy. After a few weeks, the answers came to me,’’ Antonacci remembers.

Dee had created “the world’s first index fund,’’ he says.

He tells us that she succeeded by following what were then the basics of sound investing: Her portfolio had small transaction costs because she held onto stocks forever; she saved 1 percent yearly by not having to pay a commission fee, and her portfolio was well diversified.

Calling the lessons he learned from her investment style  “a life-changing revelation,’’ Antonacci back then settled on a strategy that, with significant updating and refining during the intervening 43 years, he supports today.

What evolved from that strategy is what Antonacci calls dual momentum, a combination of absolute and relative momentum. Relative momentum is, Antonacci writes, “when an asset’s past performance relative to that of other assets is used to predict its future performance.’’ Absolute momentum, he says, is “the tendency for an asset to persist in its performance based on its own price history.’’

Antonacci, an investment consultant, has an MBA from Harvard and has been an investment professional for more than 35 years. He also writes a blog on his website. His research on momentum investing won Wagner Awards for Advances in Active Investment Management (first place in 2012 and second place in 2011) from of the National Association of Active Investment Managers (NAAIM). Recently, Dual Momentum Investing won a 2014 USA Best Book Award in the "Business: Personal Finance/Investing" category.

Antonacci packs an enormous amount of challenging detail into 141 pages over 10 chapters. (Further pages are devoted to appendices; notes; a glossary of financial and economic terms; a bibliography; and a recommended reading list.) He says that understanding and implementing his dual momentum investing strategy is demanding and time consuming, but worth it.

“What we need now is a new paradigm that dynamically adjusts to market risk and keeps us safe from the vagaries of today’s highly volatile markets. We need a way to earn long-term market returns while limiting our downside exposure. This book shows how momentum investing can make that desirable outcome a reality.’’

Although academic research has shown that momentum -- persistence in performance -- has been a valid investment strategy for more than 200 years, Antonacci says, he adds that its real-world application has been minimal.

He explains momentum principles, outlines its history, and applying modern financial theory, he shows us why dual momentum works.

On the other hand, Antonacci explains why he is less enthusiastic about hedge funds, private equity, active mutual funds and managed futures and other alternative strategies.

Which brings Antonacci to his chapter, “Asset Selection: The Good, the Bad, the Ugly,’’ which has some surprises, and next, to his alternative investment approaches.

“Using only a U.S. stock market index, an all-world non-U.S. stock market index, and an aggregate bond index, I show how investors using Global Equities Momentum (GEM) could have achieved long-run returns nearly twice as high as the world stock market over the past 40 years while avoiding severe bear market losses.’’

Antonacci believes in mining all the available data, which in the case of absolute momentum goes back to 1903, and for relative momentum, to 1801.

Dual Momentum Investing’ cites dozens of academic research studies and papers (more information on these works is available at Antonacci’s website, http://optimalmomentum.com). He provides more than 80 tables and figures (everything from GEM, leveraged and deleveraged, to parity portfolios), and he gives us both folksy and pointed quotes from experts and insiders, including George Soros, Warren Buffett,  Paul Krugman, Richard Thaler, Paul Tudor Jones, Jim Simons and others.

Antonacci admits that a comprehensive exploration of dual momentum can become weighty, as in sentences such as, “The beta coefficient of the CAPM regression equation tells you the sensitivity of an asset’s excess return to variations in the market’s excess return.’’ That is in Chapter 3, “Modern Portfolio Theory Principles and Practices,’’ which carries Antonacci’s note: “This and the next chapter are a bit wonkish. Some readers may wish to skip them and move on to Chapter 5.’’

Taking the advice of Simons, billionaire founder of Renaissance Technologies’ Medallion Fund, Antonacci says: “I have learned through my experiences with dual momentum the importance of firmly adhering to a proven, disciplined approach that has clearly shown it can successfully adapt to different market conditions.

“I have also come to recognize that I am no match for dual momentum and to value it as my best investment friend.’’

Dual Momentum Investing: an Innovative Strategy for Higher Returns With Lower Risk, by Gary Antonacci. McGraw Hill Education.  217 pages. $50.

Eleanor O'Sullivan is an award-winning freelance journalist who has written for USA Today and Gannett newspapers. She can be reached at [email protected].