Very Advanced Investing - Done For You

Welcome.

So, you want someone else to manage your investments...

That's fine, it is not for everyone.

Assuming you don't have access to the kinds of money where you need to know about Hedge Funds that outperform....here's how to get great investment performance done for you.

Cambria Asset Management provides it.  And its really good.  Check it out here!
0% Management fee.
No Commission fees.
No rebalancing fees.
Plus, they use the Betterment technology to execute it beautifully for you!

Betterment is the only other Do It For Me (DIFM) investment manager that I've ever recommended to my friends and family.  I wrote about them in this blog post back in March of 2016.

Now, Cambria and Betterment are working together and it is going to light the industry on fire.

Cambria is a fast-rising star in the investment management world.  So is Betterment.  Together they are even better.

There isn't more to say about this.
To get better performance from someone who does it all for you, you're going to have to have a lot of money to start with and you're going to have to pay them a lot of money every year.

...perhaps I'll write a post about that in the future...


If however, you don't mind a few minutes of simple re-balancing every month or so, you can save yourself some money by using Alpha Dogs.  It's the best.

Very Advanced Investing - Risk Parity

Welcome.

Risk Parity - removing unnecessary risk

Ray Dalio is one of the most famous and important men in the world of finance, and perhaps, in the whole world itself, full stop.  Most people have never heard of him.  That's kind of how he likes it (though he has done many more interviews and appearances in the recent past than ever before).

Ray Dalio founded Bridgewater Associates. 

It became the largest hedge fund in the world.

Their core investing philosophy is based around the idea of controlling risk by carefully divvying it up and expressing that investment thesis very carefully and broadly through almost all assets in almost all markets.

In a simple image - it looks like this:

A more detailed image that starts to hint at the hidden complexities in the strategy is:

I highly suggest reading as much as you can, directly from them.  They write well, and it won't take you too long to read it all.

Here is their main page.

Here is their main Risk Parity page.

The beauty of their main idea is - 

since we cannot know what the market is going to do in the future, 

let's figure out how to build a portfolio that will do well no matter what happens.  

By carefully crafting a portfolio that understands that there can only be four things happening (Growth either rising or falling and Inflation either rising or falling) and carefully selecting what goes into that portfolio so that what you own what will be going up no matter which of those four things is prevailing.

What they've found and provided for their very happy clients is that you can be properly compensated for taking appropriate risks in a smart way over time, without knowing, or even trying to guess, what is going to happen in the future.

Mr. Dalio started this as an exercise to create a safe, smart portfolio for his family.  

What could they put their money into if there wasn't an investing genius, like him, around to look out for it?  

He called his creation All Weather.  

It was a portfolio that would survive, and even thrive, through any market "weather."

In an interview with Tony Robbins, for the book Money: Master the Game,

Ray was coaxed into giving up what a "regular person's" risk parity portfolio might look like - 

without the daily rebalancing; 

without the careful asset selection; 

without the endless advanced mathematical modeling; 

and importantly, without the financial leverage that Bridgewater employs for its clients.  

Here is what Ray Dalio gave up for Tony Robbins to share with the world:

Gold 7.5%

Commodities 7.5%

Stocks 30%

Long Term US Bonds 40%

Intermediate Term US Bonds 15%

This is quite a good portfolio and it is one that an average investor could manage for themselves forever, rebalancing it on a regular basis, in a tax-efficient way.  Doing so would provide the average investor with high confidence of achieving 4 to 5% above the risk free rate of return (The risk free rate of return is, basically, what you'd earn if you hid your money in short term US Treasury Bonds).

Bridgewater does a bit better, themselves, by being so much more sophisticated with the implementation of the strategy and by using leverage to increase their returns.

Here's where I'm going to provide you with the real valuable nugget:

You can do even better and for a 0% management fee!  (If you use Vanguard.)

Check out the safety and security of the Alpha Dogs strategy offered by RB Research and manage it for yourself in a Vanguard account.  It's that simple.  

Alpha Dogs offers the same kind of sophisticated theoretical mathematical modeling going on in the background, but without you having to do the math, without you having to figure out how to do the rebalancing.  It is all done for you, you just have to choose to follow the information that is presented to you.  I think you'll find it extremely valuable!

If all that is still too much for you, I will lay out a way to get this all done for you, so you don't have to lift a finger, in my next blog post, which is coming soon!

Ray Dalio wrote a book in which he laid out his principles for success.  It is a hugely valuable book and one that I re-read frequently!  I highly recommend it.