hoo boy!), but also how to meditate and bring calm to your life. His attitude was (and in his words), “I don’t want to have to think or worry about money. I just want to surf.” He actually talked about how he hated to spend time investing, and that he didn’t think it made any sense to ‘worry about your investments after you’ve made them.’ And then, as amazing as it is to me, when explaining specifically how to allocate your money into specific funds he named (by doing so, violating the securities laws since he wasn’t licensed to offer advice), he uttered the headline of this post: “Place Your Bests, And Let It Roll”. That’s how he actually described to make money in the markets. What always amazes me is that not only is this idiot breaking the law by offering unlicensed advice to the public (as there were several hundred people in the audience), he suggests he is a genius financial guy and many people in that audience were eating his advice right up, madly scribbling down the stock tickers of the funds he mentioned. His whole shtick was that you shouldn’t need to spend any time on investing, because if you followed his system, it only took a few minutes a month, and you could easily make 30% or more a year. He even said, ‘if you’re not making at least 30% right now, then you’re doing something wrong.’ The way he talked made people feel like they were idiots if they were thinking investment is not easy, or that it would take more than 10 minutes a month to be a successful investor. Of course, in the REAL world, it IS NOT easy, and you CANNOT be a successful investor over the long term by spending 10 minutes a month doing it! But it’s a great sales pitch, and if you don’t know any better, that sounds pretty good! Show me ONE SINGLE SUCCESSFUL person in the world who spends 10 minutes a month on their investments or revenue streams! It just doesn’t work that way. In today’s world, when we have more information available to us than any other time in the history of the world, it’s shocking how much BAD information there is out there. What scared me most is that so many of the people there will never stop to check this guy, and verify in fact he has any track record or right to be giving advice to them (whether it’s illegal for him to do it or not). It’s an unfortunate reality that this is precisely why most people are not very successful financially — because they abdicate the heavy lifting to “experts”, hoping their information is at least better than what they could do on their own. And of course, if it turns out bad, well at least they have someone to blame. Which means, they don’t have to be accountable for their own results. The time my financial picture changed radically was when I became accountable for my own decisions and results, and that’s made all the difference in the world. No longer do I rely on others to do my research or tell me the best investment. It amazes me when people are willing to just believe what they’re told by someone they don’t know, on the basis that this person must be an expert, and must know more than those in the audience. With the group investments we create and manage, I never have a problem with someone doing their due diligence on things. That’s why we go to the extent of having a full annual audit completed on many of our projects, and why I never have an issue with an investor that asks for financial statements on a regular basis. In this world, there are a lot of people out there willing to say anything it takes to get someone to think their investment is the best out there. And yet, there are less people out there doing any research or due diligence on the investments they’re considering. This is why I think it’s SO important to learn how to do your OWN due diligence and investment research, so that you never have to place all of your trust and faith in someone else (who has a vested interest) to tell you whether something is a good or bad investment. Learn to ask the right questions yourself, and empower yourself to understand how investments work so that you can never be taken advantage of again!]]>