In celebration of Frank Armstrong Day let’s consider a basic question:
How hard is investing?
Let’s look at two aspects to this:
- How complicated is investing?
- How much work is investing?
Frank Armstrong
Frank Armstrong’s Strengths
It’s Frank Armstrong Day again, and a good time to think about what Armstrong is good at.
Frank Armstrong Day
We all know why we’re celebrating January 14th, right?
- Treaty ending the American Revolutionary War
- Elizabeth the First being crowned Queen of England
- Mayan warlord Siyaj K’ak’ conquering Tikal for Teotihuacan
But here’s why I’m celebrating…
Frank Armstrong Day
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:
$70 in the bank
Once upon a time there was a good family man. He paid his bills, saved diligently, and planned for the future. What he couldn’t anticipate was medical bills that pushed him to the brink of bankruptcy. When they finally ended he was down to $70 in the bank…
Is it Hard to Start Investing?
Do you have problems getting started? Most people do, so the same solutions that work for them should work for you. Don’t feel you have to begin perfectly and accomplish everything immediately–that’s not how anything else in your
life has ever worked.