Mike Chen: In late 2007 when the financial markets began to unravel many ordinary people like Mike Chen felt vulnerable and that their trust in financial professionals had been violated. "I watched helplessly as my retirement savings dwindled. The traditional approach of Buy&Hold I was taught didn't help me sleep well at night either. When I considered the prospect of not being able to retire as planned (or having to work until death) it really scared me. I knew there had to be a better way." Rather than accept that self-directed investing was too complicated he decided to figure out what was wrong with the system and how to fix it. So Mike put his background in math and software engineering to work creating a way to avoid any more catastrophic losses. Using his computer he devised a retirement investment strategy based on four specific practices:
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Relax and don't be anxious about investing. He realized you don't have to understand or even care about the complexities of global finances to be a successful investor. Simply understand that financial markets go through long term up-down cycles. -
Invest in an index of a large economy. The simple reason is that we can follow the trends of economies and their broad markets but it is nearly impossible to follow the trends of companies, market sectors, commodities or the like. -
Use the simplest and least expensive means to invest. Today this means using Index Mutual Funds or Exchange Traded Index Funds (ETF). Index funds accurately track large economies, are inexpensive, and offered by respected financial companies like Vanguard.com . -
Don't allow your emotions to influence your investing. Many see investing as an emotional roller coaster. It should not be. In order to eliminate this dangerous emotional bias Mike developed a computer model to reduce the crazy changes of the financial markets down to cold, hard numbers so you can relax and make easy decisions when to buy or sell. When Mike realized that here was a retirement investment strategy that anyone could follow he felt obligated to share it with others. So he and a colleague created a web based business called TimingTruth.com. The mission of the site is to educate and empower the average person to manage successfully their own retirement. The site offers for free simple overviews as well as detailed instructions to anyone wanting to take control of their retirement. The site supports itself by the sale of subscriptions to the computer model's buy and sell signals at amazingly low rates. This subscription allows the average person to relax and do nothing until TimingTruth emails the buy or sell information. This information comes rarely making things easy. In the last 17 years there have only been four (4) signals for the broad US market. However, acting on only these four signals would have increased a retirement fund 493 percent over a traditional Buy&Hold strategy that most retirement investors use.
Ralph Wiley: Ralph spent over 35 years developing software systems for medical, defense, and commercial industries. During that time he participated in a variety of retirement plans including government sponsored, company sponsored, and personal plans. By experiencing the various market cycles through out these years it became apparent that the much promoted Buy & Hold, Dollar Cost Averaging strategies promoted by most simply were not working. When Mike approached him to help with a web site it was an easy decision.
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