Frank Armstrong

Investing educator Frank Armstrong

In Defense of Fat & Muscle

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Lean woman in fat pants

Fat gets a bad rap but it’s amazingly efficient for storing energy.  Having no fat is a serious and painful genetic disorder.   Muscles let us do things and live our lives; nobody talks down muscle but that’s a different thing from maintaining that muscle.

But we do things as nonsensical as eliminating all fat and losing all muscle and that’s what I want to talk about in celebrating Frank Armstrong Day.  It isn’t a national holiday (yet) but together we could make it happen!  Consider the success of  International Talk Like a Pirate Day.

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Frank Armstrong Day

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Life Preserver floating in the water

What gift could make a difference if someone’s retirement plans were going nowhere?  What if their best efforts to win in the stock market kept losing?  Seems as if nothing short of a large pile of cash would make any difference, doesn’t it?  Let’s look at a better solution.

In January 1994 Frank Armstrong began serializing an investing book.  He had an interesting premise, that the conventional wisdom on investing was wrong.  Admittedly his only proof of that was that the conventional wisdom hadn’t worked.  In principle, the things he said should have been known.  Every brokerage and mutual fund had access to the same data he used.  The difference is that he let the data teach him, instead of trying to find some once in a blue moon event in the data to justify his preferences.  He was way ahead of his time, pursuing big data.  He crunched the numbers to find the mutual fund managers who delivered top returns year after year.  His great discovery:

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