About a year ago, I received a call from a friend of Tony Robbins, the renown, six foot seven inch motivational speaker. He said he was looking for billionaires to participate in a future project.
I answered that I wasn’t a billionaire yet, but that he should call me in a couple of years when I might be there.
Last week, the end result of the project landed on my desk, his book, Money, Master the Game, The 7 Simple Steps to Financial Freedom, by Tony Robbins.
Since it was a near miss of a project of my own, I thought I would give it a quick read. I wasn’t expecting much. After all, the guy walks on burning coals for a living.
I couldn’t have been more wrong. Tony has put together a very coherent, readable, and extremely well researched tome. He has even put to use a formidable research team of his own to produce some fascinating findings about the very long-term returns of different investment strategies.
I was so impressed that I called a hedge fund friend to see if he had heard of the book. Not only had he heard of it, but his CEO had read it and ordered everyone in the company to read it, down to the kid in the mail room. A call to another hedge fund garnered the same response.
Five minutes later, I was on the Amazon website ordering copies for all of my adult kids.
Read the book and you can’t help but notice that Tony Robbins seems to know everyone on the planet. Warren Buffet and Bill Gates? Sure thing. The Dalai Lama? No problem. That is not faint praise, as I am not a slouch at name-dropping myself.
What is useful to both you and me is that Tony has interviewed at length the leading investment lights of our age and extracted their innermost investment secrets.
Name the top dozen investment gurus of the last 40 years and they are all there; hedge fund legends Ray Dalio and Paul Tudor Jones.
Index fund creator John C. Bogle. Legendary long-only managers David Swensen, Mary Callahan Erdos, and Sir John Templeton. The iconoclasts T. Boone Pickens and Carl Icahn are also there.
I know most of these people myself, and you have read their interviews in the hallowed pages of this newsletter. He certainly skimmed the cream.
The introduction is a bit retail. I suppose that Tony is trying to ease the amateur investors in there slowly and prepare them for the rude shocks that follow.
Then he shatters reader preconceptions outlining his nine investment myths. I have been hammering away at my own followers for years on many of these.
The sad truth is that much of Wall Street is trying to skin you alive, leaving your investment well-being at the bottom of their list of priorities. Almost no one reliably beats the market year after year, except myself and a handful of others, and it took me 50 years trying to get there.
Fees are always larger than you think. Published mutual funds results overstate profits, as they have a strong survivor bias. Target-date mutual funds can be disastrous. Fund managers close their losers as fast as they can to skew their results.
Annuities don’t fit into the modern world. Trading means losing for most people. Almost no one can time the market (except me, again). Chasing manias can be the perfect buy high, sell low strategy.
At the end of the day, a balanced portfolio of index mutual funds and Treasury bonds rebalanced annually is probably the best solution for most.
Let me make it clear. This is not a “how to trade” book. Nor is it a “get rich quick scheme.” It is a sober and thoughtful analysis of how the average working person should invest their savings over the course of their lifetime.
At 565 pages, the book is a bit of a wristbreaker. But it is one of the best investment books that I have ever read. And I have read most of them published over the last 100 years.
In fact, I didn’t even read the book, I listened to it on an audio book from Audible.com while backpacking in the High Sierras, which is also owned by Amazon.
As I spend so much time researching and writing these letters, I have little other choice.
To buy Money, Master the Game, The 7 Simple Steps to Financial Freedom
at discount amazon pricing, please click here at http://www.amazon.com/MONEY-Master-Game-Financial-Freedom/dp/1476757801/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1427240026&sr=1-1&keywords=Money%2C+Master+the+Game%2C+The+7+Simple+Steps+to+Financial+Freedom%2C
Enjoy.
