Change Your Mind to Trump Chump Change
Many investors are frustrated by traditional investment methods. Investors have expected great returns only to see their savings not meet their needs after so many years of investing. Investors have been earning chump change. This book, In Short: Successful Investing During Turbulent Times, is a way to teach alternative investing methods in an entertaining fashion to trump that chump change.
Many books preach investing methodology as in “here is what you should do.” That just doesn’t work. Everyone already knows that they should buy low and sell high but investors (and their advisors) cannot actually do it because the human body is not designed to make investment decisions.
We humans have evolved over millions of years to be tribal, to move with the herd, and, despite our best efforts to be logical, to make important investment decisions when we feel it is right. This is contrary to what most believe but in the book we chronicle when investors bought and sold and it is clear that investors only buy after the stock or bond market has risen and sell after these markets have fallen.
Buying low can only be done during a time of great worry and selling high can only be done when the economy is booming and profits are easy to obtain. This means moving against the herd and differently than the rest of the tribe.
Real change arises when you change the way you think about investing and that is what this book is attempting to do.
Generally this means recognizing that the old investment rules no longer work.
Investors must understand that the stock market lurches along from one crisis to the next, broken occasionally by periods of calm. To make money you must confidently buy when the crisis is at its worse and confidently sell during the periods of calm.
Caution here – notice the word “confidently”. If you try to do this without the lessons in the book you might be inviting a lot of worry and second guessing into your life. You have to change the way you think before you change the way you invest.
This book leads the reader to their own insight about their feelings around investing, coaching them through a review of the behaviour of investors during past crises and leading them to their own conclusions about how they should invest in the future.
This article was prepared solely by Larry Short who is a registered representative of HollisWealth®, a division of Industrial Alliance Securities Inc. (iA Securities), a member of the Canadian Investor Protection Fund (CIPF) and the Investment Industry Regulatory Organization of Canada (IIROC).The views and opinions, including any recommendations, expressed in this article are those of Larry Short alone and not those of HollisWealth®