Investment Help

If you are seeking investment help, look at the video here on my services. If you are seeking a different approach to managing your assets, you have landed at the right spot. I am a fee-only advisor registered in the State of Maryland, charge less than half the going rate for investment management, and seek to teach individuals how to manage their own assets using low-cost indexed exchange traded funds. Please call or email me if interested in further details. My website is at http://www.rwinvestmentstrategies.com. If you are new to investing, take a look at the "DIY Investor Newbie" posts here by typing "newbie" in the search box above to the left. These take you through the basics of what you need to know in getting started on doing your own investing.

Saturday, March 6, 2010

Business Monthly article

Here's a March 2010, Business Monthly article, giving some background on my views on how people view markets:

http://www.bizmonthly.com/3_2010/15.shtml

More and more brain research is showing that there are mental illusions similar to the well known visual illusions. I am coming to believe that this is true in the investment markets. It appears that it is fairly easy to beat the market - walk into any bar and half the people there believe they could beat the market if they had money to invest- but in fact it is very difficult over the long run. This doesn't preclude the fact that there will of course be people that outperform but as has been frequently noted the percentage corresponds to what would be expected from the laws of probability. What it means is that the odds of picking a manager who outperforms over the long run is difficult.
Check out this link on illusions etc.
http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_ariely_asks_are_we_in_control_of_our_own_decisions.html

Happy March 9th anniversary.

4 comments:

  1. So flip a coin when deciding where to invest??

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  2. Do not flip a coin unless you want to do a lot of flipping. I advise my clients to own the whole market by investing for the long term in a total market exchange traded fund. Percentage, of course, depends on age, risk tolerance, and goals.
    I will be discussing this in the future when I figure out how to put a video on the blog.

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  3. Enjoyed the article. Sounds like our investment philosophies are similar.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Thanks for the post. You'll also like this talk by Dan Solin to Google employees at

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0LSG2omvEg

    it's a bit long but interesting.

    ReplyDelete