Guest Author - Guido Deboeck

A friend of mine travels a lot. He invests mainly in index funds so that “he does not have to feel bad when he misses one or two…”. Index funds go up and down with the market direction. After mid-May, it did not matter whether you were indexed in the US, Europe, Japan, Russia, China, India, Latin America or Emerging markets; they all went down. My friend does not subscribe to “market timing”. According to him “The correction starting in mid-May was…to be expected”.

This conversation inspired me to write about what Wall Street does not want you to know or realize simply because it is not in Wall Street’s best interests!

Read the following carefully and if you find yourself ticking off a few that you do not belief in, tell yourself those are the ones Wall Street wants you to belief; they are not in your best interests. Get rid of those beliefs and subscribe to all what follows to improve your own investment results.

Wall Street does not want you to realize that

1. Investing can be learned, it is a skill that can be acquired like any other skill (e.g. like riding a bike);

2. You do not need professional help to make sound investment decisions;

3. You can transact as often as you like using on-line, low cost brokerage services;

4. Management fees charged by most mutual funds are “a modern day way of robbing you” from hard-earned savings;

5. Market timing, meaning using price and volume to discern changes in market trends and hence move in and out of the market, can contribute to better returns;

6. You can read and interpret economic and financial news as well as anyone else or at least enough to discern what the markets are actually telling;

7. You can learn to pick good companies with solid fundamentals and time your purchase of stocks so as to benefit to the maximum from stock price increases;

8. You can achieve better returns on your own than relying on other people to achieve them for you;

9. Feeling good about your investments depends on you, not your financial planner or investment manager;

10. The sky is the limit of what you can achieve if you take things in your own hands.