Contrarian investment guru David Dreman advises buying bank shares now — just not shares of individual banks.

"I would buy a bank index," Dreman said during a recent interview with Q1 Publishing.

“That’s the way for an investor to get in and not have a lot of risks of any one bank.”

“You don’t want to take a rifle and shoot here. You really want to shoot at the sector with a shotgun because it’s more spread out.”

Dreman recommends a couple of index funds in particular. The first is KBW Regional Bank Index (KRE).

“It was around 45 or 50 for a while and hit highs of around 60 over a year ago,” Dreman says. “Today it’s trading at around, I think it’s around 14 or 15.”

The other index fund Dreman favors is XLF, an exchange traded fund (ETF) that tracks all the financial stocks in the S&P.

“When finances come back I think this could yield double or triple,” he says.

Investing in plain-vanilla, low-sex-appeal index funds may be the smartest move most investors can make, writes newsletter guru Mark Hulbert on MarketWatch.

“Basic stock market index funds generally aspire to nothing more than matching the returns of a market benchmark,” Hulbert notes.

“But it turns out, after fees and taxes, it is the extremely rare actively managed fund or hedge fund that does better than a simple index fund.”