The Three Myths of Investing

Rule #1: The Simple Strategy for Successful Investing in Only 15 Minutes a Week!
by Phil Town

(Page 2 of 7)

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.

Myth 2. You Can't Beat the Market.

Okay, it's true that 96 percent of all mutual fund managers have not been able to beat the market in the last 20 years. But you're not a fund manager and you're not judged by whether you beat the market. Your financial skill is judged by whether you're living comfortably when you're 75. You shouldn't care whether you beat the market. If the market goes down 50 percent but your fund manager loses only 40 percent of your money, he may have beaten the market, but does that seem good to you? Rule #1 investors expect a minimum annual compounded rate of return of 15 percent a year or more. If we can get that, we don't care what the market did. We're going to retire rich anyway. Judged by that standard, Rule #1 investors . . . well, rule.

The myth that you can't beat the market was started in the 1970s by, among others, Professor Burton Malkiel of Princeton University, who did lots of research purporting to prove that nobody beats the market. (We'll be going into greater detail regarding Malkiel's theories later on in this book, but we must mention him here to debunk this myth.) His book, A Random Walk Down Wall Street, still sells. He influenced a generation of professors in business schools who, as a body, subscribed to what has become known as Efficient Market Theory (EMT). EMT says markets in general (and the stock market in particular) are efficient - that is, they price things according to their value. In the stock market, the ups and downs of the market are caused by rational investors responding minute by minute to the events that may affect their investments. According to EMT, the market is so efficient that everything that can be known about a company is already, minute by minute, figured into the price of its stock. In other words, the price of the stock at all times equals the value of the company.

If that's true, say the professors who believe in EMT, then it's simply not possible to find a stock that's undervalued, and it's equally impossible to pay too much for a stock. Why? Because price is always equal to value. So there are no deals in the market, and there are no rip-offs. This situation, EMT theorists say, accounts for the fact that almost no fund managers ever beat the market. These fund managers are smart guys, and if none of them beats the market for long periods, then the market must be perfectly pricing everything.

But some people do beat the market for long periods, and the point of this book is to show you how. You'll soon realize how false EMT really is.

[ In 1984, Warren Buffett gave a lecture at Columbia Business School in which he showed that at least 20 investors, who he'd predicted would have high rates of return, all beat the target of 15 percent handsomely for periods longer than 20 years. All of these investors hailed from the same school of investing, which he called "Graham-and-Doddsville" because all had either learned from professors Graham and Dodd, from Buffett, or from someone who was copying Buffett - the same way I learned from my teacher and the way you're learning from me. (Benjamin Graham was Buffett's teacher at Columbia; David Dodd was another professor at the school.) The compounded annual rate of return for these investors over eight decades ranged from 18 percent to 33 percent per year. The point Buffett was making to the Columbia students was that the people he knows who make over 15 percent a year for long periods all do it similarly. They all start with Rule #1.]

After the 2000 to 2003 stock market debacle, when some very good businesses saw their stock values drop by 90 percent, Professor Malkiel was interviewed, and as we'll see in Chapter 8, he came as close to a retraction of his theory as an academician ever could when he admitted that "the market is generally efficient . . . but do[es] go crazy from time to time." Oh. It's efficient but sometimes it's not. Funny, but I thought that was what Buffett and Graham had been saying for 80 years. Buffett quips that he hopes the business schools will continue to turn out fund managers who believe in EMT so that he'll continue to have lots of misinformed fund managers to buy businesses from when they price them too cheap, and to sell businesses to when they're willing to pay too much.

Copyright © 2006 by Phil Town.

About the Author

He isn't your typical Wall Street guy. An ex-Green Beret and former river guide, Phil Town is a self-made millionaire several times over and America's most widely sought-after speaker on investing. In his new book, RULE #1, he describes the Rule #1 personal financial strategy in detail so that anyone, even first-time investors,can get - and stay - rich.