Investors: Neither China Nor Or The Dow Will Lose You A Dime!

Neither The China Or The Dow 

Will Lose You Any Money!

by: Brendan Magee

So here we are a little less than a week from the sudden drop in the Chinese Stock Market and the subsequent drop in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. No doubt when the Shanghai Index has dropped by 14.46% and the Dow goes into thousand point swings people will start talking.

With all the hoopla, I wanted to remind people that their fate as investors is and will always be in their hands. The rules for investing no matter market conditions have not changed in 80 years, own stocks/equities, diversify, buy low/sell high.  The decision to follow those rules and allow your advisor to execute those strategies rests solely with the investor. 

Should the investor panic and sell after Monday's sell off, whatever wealth was coming their way will be going to the investor who either held on to their portfolio, rebalanced their portfolio by shifting money from investments that have gone up or held steady into asset classes that went down, or brought outright stocks that went down. Eventually, when the rebound that inevitably comes, the wealth that was lost by the panicky seller will go to the steady and disciplined investor who followed the rules. The loss or gain had nothing to do with what took place in China or the Dow. It begins and ends with the investor.

Isn't it empowering to know your fate is solely in your hands, not faceless bureaucrats. So, turn off the news.There is nothing you are going to see or hear that will have any impact on your financial security.  Go play some tennis or golf. Get some exercise and wait for the tomorrow's crisis.

Brendan Magee is the founder and president of Inevitable Wealth Coaching. With questions or comments go to WWW.Coachgee.com or call 610-446-4322

Investor: Should You Be In The Ring & Can You Tell That You Have Stepped In It!

Investors: Should You Be Getting In The Ring?

                                              by: Brendan Magee

Almost two years ago, I walked into a U.F.C gym and started taking the boxing and kickboxing classes. U.F.C. (Ultimate Fighting Champion) has grown in popularity along with stars like female champion Ronda Rousey. In the two years, I lost some things and gained a few things. I have lost about twenty pounds, gained some muscle mass, and and learned how to deliver a pretty good kick that produces a pretty loud thud when my shin hits the heavy bag. It's a grueling workout, and a great one for anyone looking to lose weight and get in better shape.

One  thing I haven't lost, though, is my mind. See at the gym there is a regulation size ring for those who would like to box and a cage for those who would like to participate in mixed martial arts. There was one  night where two of the gyms trainers put on a martial arts exhibition. The gym's owner told me that it was only going to be an exhibition, nothing too intense. Let me tell you something, in my eyes, intense wasn't the word. I do not know how these two guys were able to get up and walk out of the ring. They were jumping on each other, kicking each other, punching each other, etc. The ring was not the place to be unless you were thoroughly trained in mixed martial arts. I haven't and I know the ring is not where I belong.


Days like today and last Friday when the markets are in a reported free fall are days that the location of the ring gets a little hazy and investors can find themselves in a place they are not trained for. The market plunges a few hundred points. Investors go on the internet and look at their account balances starting to turn in a downward direction and its go time. "I got to get in there and save my my retirement." What does that usually mean?  "Get me out of the market! I don't care if we agreed this was a long-term process. I need to get to my corner and cover up for a while."

It can happen the other way as well. The market has gone on to record highs and "I can't miss out on this gold mine. Take me out of this diverisfied portfolio and load up on tech stocks, U.S. Large Company Stocks, etc. I know I said I believed in diversification, but this is different."

I know what boxing gloves are. I can even do a pretty good job of wrapping my hands so they don't get torn up by hitting the bag. I can do fifty sit ups in about two to three minutes. I can point out head gear and point out the padding that will protect the most sensitive of body parts, but that doesn't make me qualified to go in the ring and start mixing it up with another boxer, especially one who has been trained for a while.

There are those who are very knowledgeable about investing too. They know the difference between stocks and bonds. They know the difference between the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the S&P 500. They can read the Wall Street Journal without falling asleep. But that doesn't mean that they should be handling or managing their investments.

When I see an experienced boxer or kick boxer hit the bag and hear the thud it makes, I know that would hurt and hurt bad. When investors see stellar track records, hear about their friends brilliant investing exploits, or hear Jim Cramer brag about how he got it right that the market was going to crash, they don't necessarily feel how bad it is eventually going to feel when they step into the ring of investing and start breaking the rules of prudent investing.

In boxing matches at least their is a referee, who if they see enough blood, steps in and maybe stops the fight or gets the fighter some medical attention. Investing on your own there is no referee. The fight goes on until the investor says stop. Usually they don't stop until they have lost way more money than they bargained for and are left wondering how they are going to pick up the pieces.  

Investors need to be informed and be engaged in what ever process they are using to invest their money. They need to understand what is being done  and why. They should be able to explain it and feel in their gut that they have been the one determining how their money should be managed. They need to take ownership, but maybe they should not be the ones actually executing that process. The mind can very easily play subtle yet deadly tricks on an investor or boxer.

Joe Frazier fighting Muhamad Ali in Manila thought he could go out for the last round, but his trainer, Eddie Futch, knew that if he took one more shot to the head he could go blind or even die. Frazier after his fighting career was over thanked his trainer for looking after him and be able to walk away from boxing in one piece. Investors can get overly confident and say "I can do that. I don't need to be paying fees for that.Let me open my E Trade Account" Unfortunately, the ref isn't there to stop the fight from getting out of control. Stay out of the ring. Pay a few bucks to watch on pay per view. Your ribs, your money, and your family will thank you later.

Brendan Magee is the founder and president of Inevitable Wealth Coaching. With questions or comments go to brendan@coachgee.com or call 610-446-4322.

Investors: There Will Be Pain!

Investors: There Will Be Pain!

                                     by; Brendan Magee




When ever my sons are going in for their doctor check ups, invariably they ask "Am I getting a needle?" Honestly, I don't always answer as truthfully as I would prefer. I sometimes think it's better to spare them needless all day anxiety dreading the moment the needle comes out and gets stuck into their little arms. In retrospect, I don't know if I am doing the right thing or not by not being totally up front and properly preparing them for the pain that is awaiting them.


Survival is important to most people. Like the boys going to the doctors, we do things to ensure our health, survival and quality of life. We exercise and we invest our money, two things we need to engage in if we aspire to a long and healthy life. Most of us know that if we are going to exercise to the degree we need to, there will be physical and emotional pain.


When I go to my exercise class at 6:00 am, there is pain. I am tired and would like to lay in bed a little longer. When I get to the class and am doing the push ups, sit ups, burpees, squats, planks, etc, there is physical pain. Honestly, if not in the class with an instructor, I would not be working as hard as I need to. It's too easy on my own to convince myself that I have worked out as hard as I need to. Other than me, who really knows? Truth is, I know and there is pain from the guilt. When I go to bed the night before the class, I know there will be pain. I also know, after a year and a half, the pain is temporary and there are good long lasting results from enduring it.


I don't know that investors and, maybe more importantly, investment advisors do a good enough job in helping investors understand that with prudent investing there will come a significant amount of pain as well.


Properly diversified portfolios will experience down years. Sometimes they will experience consecutive years of negative returns and that is painful. It is especially painful when your friend boasts that they made 15%. It is painful to do be told the best course of action is to do absolutely nothing with your portfolio when your are under performing investments that are beating the pants of off your investments. In a portfolio designed to be held for 30 years or more you will not experience pain like this just once. Their will be numerous times when everyone is telling you that you are making a huge mistake to stay with your properly diversified portfolio. They will even have tons of statistics to prove how wrong you are.


In the midst of it, the pain can be unbearable. It can seem as if it will never go away. As it is with exercise, the pain is temporary and their are long lasting benefits from being able to endure it.
I can't think of any one who lived to regret exercising too much. Matter of fact, when they are going into the operating room for the bypass, the regrets are that they drank too much, smoked too much, didn't eat properly and didn't get off the couch and exercise.


The same can be said in regards to successful investing. Long-term, there is little if any regret to following the rules in a disciplined fashion. No one that I can think of ever lived to regret systematically rebalancing their portfolio by routinely selling a portion of what was up and buying a portion of investments that were down. In the midst of executing the strategy you may think your advisor nuts and the devil in disguise by recommending such a strategy, but in the long run you will live to thank him or her for helping you to stay disciplined.


Investment advisors do their clients a disservice by not letting them know and preparing them that there will be times when their investments will be the source of a lot of pain and frustration in their lives. Rather than focusing so much attention on funds with stellar track records and building up false hopes that those returns will continue in routine fashion, perhaps advisors would do better by the investor if they went over years like 2002 and 2008. Try as best they can to let them know that those years will come back again and that it would be foolhardy to try and predict and avoid those years.


Let the investor know what the course of action will be not just for their money, but the investor as well. Turn off the television. Take walks instead. Plan on attending coaching sessions and briefings. Let the investor know that it will be times like this and how they handle the panic that is going on around them that will make or break their financial futures.


Advisors also should prepare investors for the pain that can occur during booming markets. How will it feel when you see a couple of years when U.S. Large Company Stocks has done 20%, 30% and maybe even 40% when your properly diversified portfolio has been flat the past two to three years? Everyone is going to be enjoying the party that you apparently weren't invited too. That hurts! How do you not give in to the pain and buy a lot of U.S. Large Company Stocks or Gold or Tech Stocks while they're booming. How will that feel? What will the plan be on how to deal with all the pundits telling you the market has changed and the old prudent rules no longer apply?


How investors and investment advisors can succeed is by understanding that above any thing else, it is their behavior that will be the source of their success or failure, not the market or who is the president. Let them know that this is not the easiest thing to do. There is no such thing as a free lunch. You do not lose 20 pounds by sitting on the couch eating pizza. You need to be engaged in the process and there will be times when the easiest thing to do, what people are recommending for you to do is disengage and throw it all away. Your advisors main job is to keep you disciplined and not enable destructive behavior even if you threaten to take your business from them.


I wouldn't expect my fitness instructor to allow me to walk in to their class with a bucket of fried chicken. I might be a little upset in the moment if he should take the chicken out of my hands and throw it in the trash can so I don't eat it. (Let's be honest, in the moment I would be completely pissed off!) But, if he didn't react that way to my destructive behavior, "What good is he to me?" When I am, hopefully, dancing with my wife at my children's weddings and enjoying my grandchildren I won't be missing that chicken in the least. Investors deserve and should expect nothing less from their investment advisors


Brendan Magee is the founder and president of Inevitable Wealth Coaching. With questions go to www.coachgee.com or call 610-446-4322.

Are Investors & Adviosrs Vicitims of Brainwashing?

Have We Been Brainwashed?

by: Brendan Magee

We have seen over time where people have been brainwashed into committing ungodly acts. The Nazis indoctrinated Germany into believing it was perfectly ok to kill Jews by the millions. ISIS has their soldiers at total peace in cutting off the heads of people who don't believe in their brand of Islam. People have been persuaded into drinking Koolade laced with poison that would kill them instantly. We look back at those acts and many more like them and have a hard time believing how people get talked into such behaviors. For the most part, I believe people take the position that, if under the same circumstances, they would not have caved in. They would have stuck to their principles and not succumbed to the peer pressure or brainwashing if you will.


It's our moments of pride and overconfidence that I believe we become the most susceptible to unhealthy forms of indoctrination/brainwashing. Unfortunately, investing is one of those areas where we would do well to take a step back and see, "Have I been brainwashed?" Have I been talked into behaviors and believes that on the surface seem ok, but in reality are doing harm to myself?


Brainwashing as a noun is defined as a method of systematically changing attitudes or altering beliefs. It is embodied by any method of controlled systematic indoctrination, especially based on repetition or confusion. Can you think of any industry that produces more information that absolutely no one can begin to comprehend then the investment industry? If I can control your beliefs haven't I gone a long way towards controlling your behaviors, what you will and won't do with your money?


If you do a word search on Google for the word money, 923,000,000 will come up for you to read. It would take about 5,268 years to read all those pages. Every one will have a suggestion as to what to do with your money and tons of statistics telling why their suggestion is the right one. My bet is that after 10 to 20 pages your head will start to spin. This doesn't say anything about the 28,000 mutual funds out there.


Now we come to the repetition. Every last bit of the information you read about what to do with your money promotes one of three strategies. Stock picking, market timing, and track records. Here are the stocks to own or get rid of. Now is the time to get in the market. Now is the time to get out of the market. Now is the time to buy these kinds of stocks or gold. Here is a fund with a brilliant track record over the past five, ten, 20 years and the person you should hire to manage your money. Are there any other kinds of messages that you see on TV, the inter net, the magazines, the cable shows, etc. It is a constant 24, 7, 365 stream of messages coming at investors. Does the word repetition seem appropriate?


Now long before the 1930's with the Nazis and long before the 2010 with ISIS, it was pretty much accepted that murdering innocent people was wrong. So how did so many people get talked into committing such atrocities? They couldn't tell the difference. Some were born into it. Some through coercion came to see their behavior as acceptable. They couldn't see the harm in it. They couldn't feel the harm they were inflicting on others or themselves. This wasn't the result of just one message. It was massive amounts of information going out to people and being manipulated to get people to believe and act as desired.


How does this apply to investing? Most people would never dream of taking their life savings and walking into a casino and start a daily habit of gambling and speculating with it. They know that would be downright foolish. They probably couldn't be convinced no matter how much information they were given to allow somebody else to start playing roulette, blackjack, or shoot craps with their retirement savings.


Back in 1990 the American Law Institute in writing the Prudent Investor Law came to the conclusion that "Bargain shopping in an attempt to separate the winners and losers through forecasting was deemed to be wasteful." By it's very nature stock picking, market timing, and track record investing are forecasting. It is an attempt to predict the future, no different from gambling. Yet in the fog of 28,000 mutual funds and 900,000,000 inter net pages that reality escapes the overwhelming majority of investors. They are led to behaviors that cripple their chances of ever experiencing true peace of mind with their investments.


The results don't lie. Most people, no matter what the casinos would like us to believe, do not walk into the casinos on a consistent basis and become affluent. The odds are not in their favor. In fact, there are mathematical formulas proving that the more you gamble, the more you will lose. That same mathematical evidence applies to stock picking, market timing, and track record, investing. Affluence does not result from those activities. More accurately, poverty results from those activities. From 1984 through 2013 U.S. Large Company Stocks annualized return was 11.10%. The average Stock mutual fund investor's annualized return in that time  was 3.69%.Inflation was up an annualized 2.80% over that same time. The tragedy is that investors are doing it to themselves.


I don't believe someone, unless mentally disturbed, would intentionally do harm to themselves. Most people would prefer to grow, thrive, and be at peace. Yet we can't ignore that it is the decisions and behaviors of the investor that is at the root of their problems.


There is only one way to begin to start the healing process and end the cycle of destruction investors are inflicting upon themselves. That is for investors to consider and see for themselves,  that are the victim of a systematic effort to brainwash the investing public. The only way to do this is through being asked the right questions. 


 Do you know the three warning signs that you are engaged in or are allowing someone to gamble and speculate with your money as opposed to prudently investing it? If you can't, brainwashing has seeped into your beliefs, attitudes, decisions, and behaviors. Best not to resist or deny the condition. The damage will only continue unabated. The best course of action would be to accept it and accept that most likely on your own you will not overcome it. On your own, you will be taking on years and years of mental hard wiring. Allow someone qualified to lead you to the cure by helping you to ask the right questions and keep you there.


The great news in all of this is that if your are the source of the damage being done, you are also the source of the cure as well. You are more powerful then you may realize. Access to this power is accepting responsibility for what has been done. Be generous to yourself and don't condemn yourself for being human, and perhaps most importantly, realize where it is that you are powerless. You are up against your own hard wiring, the media, and the investment industry. Maybe you need to realize that to take on the evil empire you need help.




Brendan Magee is the founder and president of Inevitable Wealth Coaching. With questions or comments go to www.coachgee.com or call 610-446-4322

Chattanooga, Guns, & Robo Advisors And Mayhem

Chattanooga, Guns And Robo-Advisors

by: Brendan Magee

Tragically, news of sudden bursts of gun fire and loss of life such as the one that played out in Chattanooga, Tennessee are becoming the norm. Does a day go by any more where this isn't in the headlines? They add fire to the national debate over gun control. Some argue that the government needs to be given more power to step in and take people's guns away from them. Others point to people like Mohammad Youseff Abdulazeez who rained a hail of bullets on two recruiting stations as the reason people need the right to arm and protect themselves. They point out that if U.S. Naval Officer Timothy White did not have his gun to fire at Abdulazeez the tragedy would have been even worse.

So who is right in this debate? The honest answer is that there is merit to what both sides have to say. Most people would agree that it is not in the public's best interests for the police to be outgunned by people who are out to harm citizens. Then again, with all the violence out there be it from would be terrorists, criminals, drugged crazed individuals, a person has the right to defend themselves. The police can't be everywhere.
With either side, there doesn't seem to be any debate about a shortage of guns. There's plenty to go around.

I don't know if it is the gun or the hand that is pulling the trigger that is the issue. A gun in the hands of the right individual can be beneficial. The continent of Europe will tell you guns came in pretty handy in defeating the Nazis. Conversely a gun in the hands of  someone like Abdulazeez hell bent on killing someone can prove lethal. I am wondering if more responsibility needs to be put in the hands of those who are distributing the guns. Are they putting society at greater risk by allowing individuals who do not have the skill or mental make up to safely use a gun? If the person becomes mentally unstable or careless maybe the government should be able to confiscate the gun.

Just as there is an ample supply of guns out there, there is also an ample supply of investment products out there for people to purchase. Just like a gun in the hands of the wrong person, an investment product in the hands of the wrong person can prove life changing. The latest fad of Robo-Financail Advisors is going to put more investment products in the hands of people who are not qualified to be using them.

Usually, when a person buys a gun there is a safety course on how to use the gun, how to store the gun, etc. So there is at least some attempt to prevent a tragedy form happening. With Robo-Advisors, there isn't any hands on supervision. From the comfort of your own computer, an investor answers a few questions and from there the investor is free to invest. Whether or not they understand what they are doing or not isn't much of a consideration. From the investment industry's perspective it enables them to get their products in the hands of the investor quicker and more efficiently. What could be better?

The problem is that just like firing a gun, investment decisions have life changing consequences. For some the idea of owning a gun is an emotional rush. It's empowering. Making investments is also just as emotionally charged. The idea of becoming financially independent or hitting it big can be just as seducing and lethal. Unfortunately, emotionally charged decisions without wisdom usually turn out bad. Just ask the Japanese about Pearl Harbor.

The problem with guns and Robo-Advisors is that once in the hands of the consumer the safety net is gone, and the public needs all the safety nets it can get and so do investors.

Brendan Magee is the founder and president of Inevitable Wealth Coaching. With questions or comments go to www.coachgee.com or call 610-446-4322.