This post is part of a series:
Part I Part II Part III Part IV Part V Part VI Part VII Part VIII Part IX
I’ve experimented with four distinct investment strategies over the last fourteen years. And as one would expect, I learned a few valuable lessons from each strategy. That’s always nice.
But far more importantly, I learned one single overarching principle. Perhaps secret is a better term.
What I stumbled upon is something the financial press desperately doesn’t want us to know. CNBC would go the way of CNN+ tomorrow if this got out.
The more I think about it, the more I think we’ve been spinning our wheels unnecessarily. As a society and as individuals.
Simply put, the way we’ve been told to go about things is wrong. If our goal is financial independence – financial freedom – there’s a better way.
I’ll explain with a little context. It starts at the beginning of my financial journey…
My first investment strategy was simple. I bought whatever stock Merrill Lynch’s free research reports said to buy.
The beauty of this approach was in its simplicity. Every time my paycheck hit, I went online to find out what Merrill was touting to its low-dollar clientele. Then I punched in the ticker and pressed buy.
This is how I found the most valuable investment I ever made. The company was called A123 Systems. It was developing lithium-ion batteries for hybrid electric vehicles.
A123 received $249 million from the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) in August 2009. I believe this was part of Obama’s “clean energy” initiative.
And management leveraged the notoriety that followed to go public at a valuation of $1.3 billion. That was September 2009. The company’s ticker was AONE.
Three years later A123 filed for bankruptcy. It ended up getting acquired by a China-based firm for less than what the DoE put into it: $225 million.
That represents a loss of 83% from AONE’s IPO price. This turned every $1,000 invested in AONE into $170. Ouch.
And that’s when I learned two very important lessons.
Lesson One: Don’t invest based on free information.
Lesson Two: Don’t invest in anything the banks are touting. They work for somebody else.
Equipped with these lessons, I pivoted to a “hard assets only” strategy. We’ll talk about it a lot more tomorrow.
In the mean-time, please set aside some time to check out our new video workshop. I’m calling it Finance for Freedom.
In the workshop, we talk about where the traditional financial planning model goes wrong… and what we can do about it.
More specifically, we detail a tried-and-true system for working up to $10,000 a month in investment income. That’s how we break out of the rat race and ensure ourselves a comfortable retirement… if retirement is our goal.
You can access the video workshop right here: https://phoenicianleague.com/workshop
And don’t worry, there’s a transcript available if you don’t have time to watch the entire video.
But please don’t delay. Access closes on October 8th at midnight.