Read an Excerpt
Chapter 1: The Myths of Investing
An expert is a person who avoids small error as he sweeps on to the grand fallacy. —Benjamin Stolberg (1891–1951)
The gold standard of low-risk investing is a ten-year United States Treasury bond, which, at the time of this writing, has a return of about 4 percent. Invest in nothing but these bonds and you’re guaranteed a 4-percent haul. The only problem with such a strategy, especially for the millions of soon-to-be-retired baby boomers, is that, at 4 percent, it takes 18 years to double your money. In addition, after 18 years, even with a low inflation rate of 2 to 3 percent, most of the gain is absorbed by higher prices, leaving you with only slightly more buying power than you had 18 years earlier. Despite this reality, investors buy billions of dollars of these 4-percent bonds.
Why in the world would anyone want to own a bond that barely keeps pace with inflation and realizes almost no real gain in wealth? Because almost everyone is convinced that a higher rate of return necessarily means a lot more risk. And they’re more afraid of losing money in an attempt to get a higher return than of their inability to retire comfortably.
The fact is, a higher rate of return is not necessarily contingent on incurring significantly more risk. Let me explain.
HIGH RETURNS DON’T NECESSARILY MEAN MORE RISK
During a talk at the America West Arena in Phoenix, Arizona, I asked the audience, “How many of you drove your cars here today?” Most people raised their hands. “Okay, almost everybody. And how many of you took a huge risk driving here?” A few hands went back up. “You guys took a huge risk driving here?” I asked incredulously. “Either you drivers didn’t really take a risk and are just clowning around, or at last we’ve found the problem with Phoenix traffic—you people with your hands up don’t know how to drive. Is that it?” Everybody laughed. “Okay, so it wasn’t so terrifying to drive down here. But now imagine that you’re coming here but instead of you doing the driving, it’s your eleven-year-old nephew behind the wheel. Are you taking a lot of risk now?” People laughed and nodded yes. “The trip was the same—going from Ato B. But when you put someone in the driver’s seat who doesn’t know how to drive, a relatively safe trip becomes an incredibly risky trip.”
Exactly the same thing holds true for your journey to financial freedom. If you don’t know what you’re doing, your journey is going to be either very slow or very dangerous. That’s why most people think that going fast (going after a high rate of return) is dangerous—because they don’t know how to drive the financial car, and not because going fast is necessarily dangerous. It’s only dangerous if you don’t know what you’re doing. And the essence of Rule #1 is knowing what you’re doing—investing with certainty so you don’t lose money!
Now, you’re probably wondering, “What about mutual funds? What about all those techniques we learn to minimize risk and maximize returns?” Well, folks, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but here’s the truth: Being a mutual fund investor is a whole lot riskier than being a Rule #1 investor. Investing in a mutual fund is, in many ways, like handing your car keys to that 11-year-old nephew.
THE MUTUAL FUND SCAM
If you own mutual funds that are attempting to beat the market, and you’re hoping your fund manager can give you a nice retirement, you’re highly likely to be the victim of a huge scam. You’re not alone—100 million investors are right there with you. Fortune magazine reports that since 1985 only 4 percent of all the fund managers beat the S&P 500 index, and the few who did it did so by only a small margin. In other words, almost no fund managers have done what they’re paid by you to do—beat the market. That significant fact went unnoticed through the roaring 1980s and 1990s as the stock market surged with double-digit growth, bringing your fund manager along for the joyride. But now the ride is over, and investors are starting to notice that their fund managers are pretty much useless. This is not a new observation.
Several years ago, Warren Buffett said this about your fund manager: “Professionals in other fields, like dentists, bring a lot to the layman, but people get nothing for their money from professional money managers.” The key word here is nothing. And yet, what do you do? You give your hard-earned money to one of these guys and hope he can deliver those 15-percent-or-better returns, like the ones you got in the 1990s. Why? Because you don’t want to invest your own money, and because you’ve been convinced by the entire financial services industry that you can’t do it yourself.
Come on, get real. From 2000 to 2003, mutual funds lost half their value. You could have lost 50 percent of your money without the help of a professional. In fact, in 1996 a monkey was hired to compete with the best fund managers in New York. He beat them two years in a row. When I told this story one day to an audience in Los Angeles, someone from the upper deck in the Arrowhead Pond Arena yelled out, “What’s the name of the chimp?” This is proof that some people will do anything to avoid investing their own money.
Peter Lynch, one of the few fund managers who made above-market returns and then got out before the market leveled him, wrote in his book One Up on Wall Street that the amateur investor has “numerous built-in advantages, which, if exploited, should result in outperforming the market and the experts.” In other words, you should be doing this yourself. But you don’t. The reason you don’t is that the entire financial services industry perpetuates three myths of investing to keep people investing with them in spite of the industry’s dismal performance over any long period.
THE THREE MYTHS OF INVESTING
Myth 1. You Have to Be an Expert to Manage Money.
The first myth I want to bust is that it takes a lot of time and expertise to manage your money. It would if investing were hard to learn or if getting the information to make a decision took a lot of time. I’ll prove to you that it doesn’t, even though the financial services industry wants us to believe it does. The industry stands to make billions from commissions and fees if it can keep you thinking you can’t do it on your own.
The Internet has changed everything. Now the tools that used to cost $50,000 a year are available for less than two bucks a day and take only minutes a day to use instead of 50 hours a week. And the Internet tools are more accurate, more timely, and easier to apply than anything your fund manager had just a couple of years ago. All you need is a little instruction and a brief learning period. But don’t bother to ask your broker, financial planner/adviser, certified public accountant (CPA), or fund manager if you should do this on your own. You know what they’re going to say. Something like, “But that’s what I do for you, so you don’t have to worry about it.” Well, you should worry about it. Alot. It’s your money and you’re the only one who really cares about what happens to it.
Even the pros like Jim Cramer, a guy who’s in your corner and who wants to see you invest on your own, doesn’t really know what it’s like to be one of us. Like the rest of the top of the financial industry, Jim’s Ivy League, incredibly smart, loves playing with stocks all day and night, lives it and breathes it and has no sense of what it’s like to be you and me out there digging ditches someplace and hoping we can retire. For these guys it’s a game. Aserious game, but still a game. Jim’s a trader and loves to speculate. Following his approach, you’ve got to put in five to ten hours a week minimum and you’re playing a very dangerous game with money you can’t afford to lose against really rich, really smart, and really motivated guys—guys just like Jim.
If you think you can win at that game, be my guest. And if you do win, my hat goes off to you. You’re a lot smarter than the rest of us. For everybody else, me included, there has to be another way. Most of us don’ t have five hours a week for investing. Let’s face it. We’ve got kids to raise, lives to live, and jobs that already take more time than we have. We also don’t want to be chained to watching the stock market or to become frantic day traders. What fun would that be? We’re just looking for something to invest in that gets really great returns without the risk of losing money and without spending a lot of time at it.
Rule #1 is investing for the rest of us.