Thinking For a Change

“If everyone is thinking alike, no one is thinking”  -Gen. George Patton

You’ve heard me say, what got you here, won’t keep you here.  We have to move on.  We have to get outside our comfort zone.  We have to take risks.

I define risk as doing something different than the “herd.”  Getting away from doing what everyone else is doing.  You might say, thinking outside the box…which is accurate, but it goes even beyond that.  There is a huge element of leadership and responsibility involved.  You start taking risks meaning, doing things that noone else is doing, and you are wrong, you will face scrutiny, job loss, and short term failure.  Guess what, that is o.k.!  If you are not failing and learning from those failures, you simply are not growing or creating value for the world. 

As a Chief Investment Officer for our firm, I manage my clients’ (and my family’s dreams).  My system of portfolio management is completely different than main stream financial advisors and brokers.  This has BIG TIME advantages (To learn more visit www.richinvest.com).  However, it also comes with scrutiny.

Main stream advisors and brokers (you all know who they are, and to much dismay, many of you still engage their services) love to stick to the standard line.  Because every main stream advisor and broker essentially does the same thing, they are able to blame external factors when their performance lags or they lose you money.  How is this, you might be asking?  Instead of accepting personal responsibility for subpar performance or mistakes, they blame the market.  So when the market is doing poorly, it is very easy and convenient for that broker or financial advisor to say things like, “Everyone else is having problems as well, I can’t control the market.”  Or, “Everyone is in the same boat, we have to ride it out.”  Nice, safe, standard responses that are hard to refute, no?  The antithesis to the above is Rich Investments.  We are not perfect, no one is.  And, absolutely, the market can’t be controlled.  However, we can control our strategies and investment selections (just like our decisions, attitudes, and habits in life) to either break the dependence on the broad markets or to exploit trends in all kinds of markets.  Here is an example, there are several mutual fund families that offer Inverse Index Funds, or funds that do well when the market is falling.  Wouldn’t it have been nice to have had a strategy that used these funds in 2008?  You see, you don’t have to be like everyone else.  However, here is the catch.  It ain’t that easy. 

Remember, when I said earlier that in addition to having big time advantages, my methodolgy also comes with scrutiny.  I have been rewarded handsomely for my investing model, but it has also come with a price.  I estimate that approximately 1/3 of the time it can appear to not be working.  Oh yes….don’t worry, my clients let me know BIG TIME when this is the case.  And guess what, because of personal accountability and the value proposition of our firm, I do not have the luxury of using the standard, run of the mill, response that main stream advisors and brokers use.  The buck stops here per se!  Why?  Because each of our portfolio objectives is to generate postive returns over a full market cycle (5 years) regardless of market conditions.  Our client’s returns rest with us, NOT the stock market. 

Be well my friends,

Matt