The 401K and IRA retirement programs represent the best opportunity for all Americans to generate life changing wealth. You will not have access to the tremendous benefits of these programs anywhere else.
Tax savings on your contributions to these accounts.
Tax free growth over decades.
Free money from your employer via the company match.
If managed properly, the average worker should be able to retire with a mult-million-dollar retirement nest egg.
But here’s the catch. Most people don’t.
In fact, 25% of workers reach age 65 with no retirement savings and most people with 401K and IRA accounts retire with only about half the money they need in retirement.
As a result, people struggle in their retirement years. Most people are forced to keep working beyond age 65 to survive.
Most people know this which is why most people have a love-hate relationship with their 401K.
THE OBSTACLES
There are many reasons why we have this 401K problem in America:
Nobody receives the kind of training they need to take advantage of the incredible opportunity that 401Ks and IRAs offer.
The information that is available to individual investors is confusing and not helpful.
People are frustrated by the situation, so they avoid dealing with it.
My mission is to help as many people as possible to turn this situation around.
It begins with the RIGHT education. Through my posts, video courses, and books, I want to train people the right way. There are just a few things that people need to know to become confident and successful investors. And there are lots of pieces of investing advice that you need to ignore.
THE OPPORTUNITY
Becoming a very good investor is not that hard. It is actually pretty easy.
The investment industry tries to make investing more complicated and more exciting than it needs to be. That complication and excitement allows them to sell us more mediocre products and services.
There are only two things you need to do to become an excellent investor.
Make better investment choices – picking better funds in your 401K will improve your investment results significantly.
Protect your money against major losses – having a proven and effective strategy to deal with stock market collapses will increase your investment returns and allow you to sleep better at night.
By joining our Beyond Buy & Hold program and becoming part of our community, you are well on your way to doing both of these things.
The available solutions from the investment industry don’t help. Target date funds won’t help. Bonds won’t help. International funds won’t help. In fact, their solutions will keep your from creating a sufficient retirement nest egg.
I developed the Market Signals investing system to help people to fix their 401Ks. Retirement investors need both high investment returns AND protection against losses. We have all been told that we can’t have both. But it is possible. My Market Signals investment system generates much higher investment returns AND keeps your money protected against the devastating losses in bear markets.
Investors who utilize Market Signals can generate multi-million-dollar retirement accounts AND keep their money safe at the same time.
Stick with the program and we will help you get there too.
Stay Disciplined My Friends,
Phil
Disclaimers The Beyond Buy & Hold newsletter is published and provided for informational and entertainment purposes only. We are not advising, and will not advise you personally, concerning the nature, potential, value, or suitability of any particular security, portfolio of securities, transaction, investment strategy or other matter. Beyond Buy & Hold recommends you consult a licensed or registered professional before making any investment decision.
Investing in the financial products discussed in the Newsletter involves risk. Trading in such securities can result in immediate and substantial losses of the capital invested. Past performance is not necessarily indicative of future results. Actual results will vary widely given a variety of factors such as experience, skill, risk mitigation practices, and market dynamics.
When the conditions are right, we often shift money into more aggressive growth funds. Our preferred growth fund options are the Nasdaq index fund (ONEQ) and the Nasdaq-100 index fund (QQQ). The Nasdaq is the other major US stock exchange besides the New York Stock Exchange. The Nasdaq contains more growth companies than the S&P 500 and a higher concentration of technology companies.
There are very few funds that can outperform the Nasdaq index funds, particularly the Nasdaq 100 index fund (QQQ). But there are a handful that you could consider if you want to get more growth from your investments. Like the Nasdaq, they tend to be highly volatile, and you would want to combine an aggressive strategy like this with our Market Signals system to protect against what could be large losses in bear markets.
You should also note from the funds listed below that there are only a handful of funds out of the total universe of 9,000 funds that can even be considered based on a 30-year track record. This is why I am constantly recommending index funds vs. mutual funds or attempting to pick stocks on your own.
Most of the aggressive growth funds worth considering are heavily invested in technology stocks like the ones included in the Nasdaq-100. Many of the top performing aggressive growth funds look a lot like the Nasdaq-100. They try to mirror the Nasdaq-100 so they show up in the list of top performing funds. In this case, you are better off sticking with the Nasdaq-100 index fund because it will carry lower fees and expenses.
The Fidelity Growth Fund is one of the best performing mutual funds. Its individual stock holdings and its sector allocations are very similar to the Nasdaq-100. Its performance also mirrors the Nasdaq-100.
Other top performing aggressive growth funds go even deeper into technology and focus on narrow sectors like semiconductors. The semiconductor segment has performed very well recently because of the momentum behind artificial intelligence infrastructure companies (NVIDIA). These funds would tend to be even more volatile than the Nasdaq.
The other Fidelity and Vanguard aggressive growth funds on the list are different than the Nasdaq-100. They are almost exclusively invested in tech companies compared to the Nasdaq-100 that has about 50% of its assets invested in technology.
CONCLUSION
For the investor that is interested in aggressive growth, I would recommend including the Nasdaq-100 and one of the tech-focused funds listed in the table. Depending upon how aggressive you wanted to be you could allocate different percentages to each of the funds.
If you are the type of investor who is willing to take on more risk to achieve higher investment returns, you do have some options. It is possible to achieve higher average annual returns in the long run by investing in top performing aggressive growth funds.
You will be taking on more risk is due to less diversification. If something bad happens in the technology sector, losses in these funds could be significant and prolonged. Market Signals can mitigate most of that risk.
Stay Disciplined My Friends.
Phil
Disclaimers The Beyond Buy & Hold newsletter is published and provided for informational and entertainment purposes only. We are not advising, and will not advise you personally, concerning the nature, potential, value, or suitability of any particular security, portfolio of securities, transaction, investment strategy or other matter. Beyond Buy & Hold recommends you consult a licensed or registered professional before making any investment decision.
Investing in the financial products discussed in the Newsletter involves risk. Trading in such securities can result in immediate and substantial losses of the capital invested. Past performance is not necessarily indicative of future results. Actual results will vary widely given a variety of factors such as experience, skill, risk mitigation practices, and market dynamics.
All investors should be long-term investors and your long-term odds when investing in the stock market are exceptional. Look at how the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq and the Nasdaq-100 have performed over long periods of time. The results are terrific and amazingly consistent.
Investing odds are very different than gambling odds. The odds are heavily tilted in favor of the casino when you gamble. The house does always win. You can get lucky in the short-term but if you play long enough, the house will win.
It is the exact opposite with stock market investing. The long-term odds are totally in the investors favor. But short-term results will be highly volatile and erratic. Even though you can expect long-term gains of 10% per year, bear markets periodically lead to losses of 30%, 40% and even 50% in short time frames.
Other than picking the best large cap index funds for your investments, the only thing left to do is to deal with inevitable bear market collapses. Every six to seven years on average the stock market will drop by roughly 40% over a time period of roughly eleven months.
All of the difficulties that investors face can be traced back to stock market meltdowns. Your success as an investor will come down to how you deal with market crashes.
Some people avoid stocks altogether and end up generating terrible returns on their investments.
Some people follow the industry advice of asset allocation and spread their investments across many different assets and asset classes (bonds, small cap stocks, international stocks, real estate, commodities, etc.). The “asset allocators” end up getting only about 6.5% to 7.0% annual investment returns AND they still get crushed in bear market.
Some people put all their money in large cap index funds like the ones we recommend and simply follow the Buy & Hold approach. They figure out a way to deal with watching their life savings get cut in half periodically knowing that the market will rebound eventually. This approach works but we created an approach that gives the best of both worlds – high long-term gains with the best large cap index funds AND avoiding most of the pain and suffering of bear markets.
While it is not possible to perfectly avoid bear market crashes, you can tilt the odds in your favor to both increase your investment returns and avoid the pain and suffering of stock market collapses.
ROGER FEDERER
I came across this story about Roger Federer, the great tennis player, and his statistics mirror what we do to beat bear markets with our Market Signals investment system.
Roger Federer won 80% of his tennis matches over his long professional career. When the tennis experts analyzed his winning matches, they found that he only won 54% of the points in those matches. That was surprising to me. I would have guessed that he won closer to 70% of the points in the matches that he won.
Federer had a Hall of Fame tennis career by only winning slightly more points than his opponents. He won just enough points to get a big edge over his opponents.
The stock market is similar. When we look at how the S&P 500 does on a daily basis, the stats are similar to those of Roger Federer. The stock market posts a daily gain only 52.4% of the time. It posts a loss 46.4% of the time and it is flat 1.2% of the time.
These unexciting daily results generate long term annual gains of roughly 8% per year (not including dividends). This shows us that the daily ups and downs don’t matter much. It is only the long-term trends that matter in investing.
Our Market Signals Investment System uses odds and probabilities to avoid the worst of bear market crashes. It is not correct all the time, but it still beats the Buy & Hold approach by a wide margin.
Like Roger Federer, we win the important points in the match. By just being a little bit better than the market in the periodic meltdowns, we see results that are 50% better than the market over time. We don’t win every point, but we win the match.
Do you want to be a Hall of Fame investor or a mediocre investor?
Stay Disciplined My Friends.
Phil
Disclaimers The Beyond Buy & Hold newsletter is published and provided for informational and entertainment purposes only. We are not advising, and will not advise you personally, concerning the nature, potential, value, or suitability of any particular security, portfolio of securities, transaction, investment strategy or other matter. Beyond Buy & Hold recommends you consult a licensed or registered professional before making any investment decision.
Investing in the financial products discussed in the Newsletter involves risk. Trading in such securities can result in immediate and substantial losses of the capital invested. Past performance is not necessarily indicative of future results. Actual results will vary widely given a variety of factors such as experience, skill, risk mitigation practices, and market dynamics.
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