What I Hated About Investing...

 What I Hated The Most About Investing

by: Brendan Magee, Investor Coach

During my time as a financial planner, there was a lot I grew to dislike about investing. There was so much information to digest which I could never make sense of. There were new investment products coming out every week, and it made me fearful that last week's investment products were now inferior. There were track record that far too often didn't continue after I invested in them. There were questions that I had about investing that always got a very professional sounding answer back from people who seemed to know what they were talking about, but didn't answer my questions which only added to my frustrations. Given all that, I could never feel confident in the investment decisions I was making for myself or my clients. The unanswerable question was, "What do I have to do to be confident about investing?"

On top of that, what I realized was, that without any understanding of how the world of investing worked, I was blindly handing over my money and that of my clients to people I had never met (fund managers, I most likely never would either), to a process I had no understanding as to whether or not it actually worked, nor would I know what to do if I found out wasn't working.

That wasn't the worst of it. What I hated the most about investing was my future, and that of my clients was in the hands of something I had no understanding of, not did I have any control over. My fate, and that of my family's, was based on blind random luck. Having gone to school to get an education and worked hard to build up my financial planning practice, not having a say over how my future was going to go didn't appeal to me one bit. Matter of fact, I hated it and the truth of the matter was, I was ready to throw the towel in and give up.

The breakthrough didn't come from another product. It came from a coach helping me to discover how markets actually worked. How markets set prices and how markets generated returns. With that, every question I ever would have thought to ask about investing, and more importantly every question I never would have thought to ask about investing got answered. This was a ten thousand pound monkey that I couldn't possibly describe how good it felt to get off my back.  I now had the freedom and power to clearly choose how my money would and wouldn't be managed. I knew where to put my money and understood exactly why it should there.  My destiny was now back in my hands because I knew that my future depended solely on my behavior, not anyone else's. I knew exactly what I had to do to not only fulfill on my American Dream but start experiencing it today.

Nothing about the world I was living in had changed. I was still an individual living in a world of some 20,000 mutual funds with a media spinning a 24 hour a day message of doom and gloom. Who I was, living inside that world had been completely transformed. My relationship with investing had been transformed in an instant from confusion, stress, and anxiety to one of freedom, clarity, confidence, peace, and empowerment. I knew how to tap into the most powerful wealth creation system ever created, and how to use it to fulfill on my true purpose for money. 

Helping people to transform their relationship with money and investing is what I have been put on this earth to do. It starts with understanding how markets actually work. Couple that discovery with creating your true purpose for money and you will be living an unrecognizable future. Let me know if I can help you. 

Brendan Magee is the founder and president of Inevitable Wealth Coaching. With any questions or comments email brendan@coachgee.com or call 610-299-3969

     

Robinhood's Big Lie!

 

Robinhood's Big Lie!

by: Brendan Magee

 Robinhood is getting a lot of publicity these days. Their trading application has gone viral. From January through April they added three million funded accounts, and their company has an estimated value of $11.2 billion. 

The company has also gained some negative attention. Robinhood has settled with the Securities and Exchange Commission for $65 million as a result of charges that it mislead investors about the costs of trading while using their application. 

That aside, the biggest danger posed by Robinhood comes from a claim they make in one of the advertisements. In the ad they claim to the public, "You were born an investor." Nothing could be further from the truth, but unfortunately many an unsuspecting investor will see the validity in that statement thinking,  "What could go wrong?" 

Massachusetts Securities regulators have found somethings wrong with how Robinhood is aggressively and misleadingly marketing themselves to inexperienced younger investors. Their charges contend that Robinhood is luring young investors into making risky and costly trades by making it seem more like a video game rather than alerting investors to the dangers, costs and risks of excessive trading. Unfortunately, one 20 year old never heeded any warnings and after believing he ran up debts of over $730,000 committed suicide. 

The plain truth is, people are not born investors any more than they are born surgeons or professional athletes. However, they are born human which makes them vulnerable. They are vulnerable to a good story. They are vulnerable to believing something about themselves that just isn't true.  They are vulnerable to wanting to belong to a crowd and will do anything to fit in. This is what Robinhood is cashing in on. They are turning the next generation of investors into gamblers without them ever suspecting it. All the while, Robinhood is cashing on on the destruction of their American Dreams.

Brendan Magee is the founder and president of Inevitable Wealth Coaching. With comment or question send an e mail to brendan@coachgee.com. 

Phil Town Rule #1 Investing Destroying American Dreams

 

Phil Town & Rule#1 Investing:

Talking Investors Into Destroying Their 

Own American Dreams

by: Brendan Magee

 There is no shortage of con men, gurus, and prognosticators lining up to profit off the demise of hard working people's American Dreams and Phil Town, founder of Rule#1 Investing falls right into that group. 

Some how some way I have found myself on the receiving end of his Facebook posts and when I looked into what he was offering,  I couldn't believe it. I mean you really have to have a lot of nerve to legitimately offer to people such complete nonsense knowing full well there is no way in hell you can deliver on your claims.

His first claim is that investors "Can achieve average annual returns upwards of 15% buying wonderful companies on sale." Now when you go to his virtual seminar you will learn a system and a strategy for finding great companies which will only cost you $297. 

According to Town, a wonderful company is. "One that will continue to grow as the years go by, surviving whatever challenges the market may throw at them along the way." 

So right there is a bait and switch. People who follow his method of investing won't be investing, they'll actually be engaged in predicting the  future. No matter what the market throws at these "wonderful companies," they are going to grow, and if the past two years has taught us anything the future is relatively easy to know in advance. Really, at the end of 2019 who didn't know a global pandemic was coming and that the world's economy was going on lockdown?

Even more evidence that you won't need to protect yourself from the future is Rule#1 Investing's claim that, "You don't need to diversify, if you know how to invest."   The reality is you don't need to diversify if you can predict the future. If you know every year what the top performing companies are going to be, there is absolutely no need to diversify. Here again, Rule#1 Investing shows its flaws. If you can identify the top performing company, why would you need to buy more than one? Why wouldn't you simply buy the company that was going to perform the best? Why waste any money on the second best company?

The simple truth is no one can predict the future, no matter how much they would like to believe it. Rule #1 investing is putting people in the same position as people walking into a casino. They are gambling, only they may be doing it with money they will need to retire or put their kids through college. Gambling a few bucks on a football game or on a weekend in Vegas may be enjoyable and harmless, but talking people into doing that with the money they will need to fulfill on their American Dream is disgusting. Unfortunately, the only protection people have from these kinds of scams is to be aware of them and avoid them before they fall victim to their seductive pitches. 

If you have any comments or suggestions, call 610-299-3969 or send an email to brendan@coachgee.com.