Nick Hodge,
Publisher
Jan. 20, 2022
I wanted to kick off the year by saying “Rest in Peace” to all the financial advisors and many of the newsletter writers out there — at least in their professional incarnations.
Last year, I was writing about how I had given half a million dollars to a financial advisor here in Spokane, and I was watching to see how they managed that money over a year.
The year just ended and the S&P delivered a very good return, something like 27%. And the financial advisor didn't come anywhere close to matching that with the funds that I had given them.
So I've taken those funds back.
And in Foundational Profits — which is my monthly newsletter where I write about long-term macro trends, things you should be putting your safe money into, ETFs, dividend companies and things like that — I'm going to be writing about how I manage that money. That would be previous 401k money from other employers and IRA money that I've stashed away over the years.
You really don't need a financial advisor to do that for you.
It's quite easy for anyone to manage their funds, or at least select allocations on their employer-provided retirement plans, to match or beat the returns of the market.
I say RIP to newsletter writers because you're seeing a lot of layoffs and folding of letters in the business because they can't keep up with the pace of the market returns.
Like I say, the S&P just delivered a 27% annual return and many other sectors are going up faster than that, including cryptos.
People are looking to do this on their own and they're not looking for the same old ideas over and over. Publishing the same idea over and over is a specialty of many newsletter publishers out there.
I don't have that confinement at Foundational Profits because it's what I'm doing with my own money.
That's sort of the point of Digest Publishing and that's what our ethos is: kicking Wall Street to the curb and managing your money yourself by identifying cycles in the market that allow you to multiply your wealth faster.
In the premium issue you can access here, I go over portfolio guidance for the first quarter of 2022. That includes three new buy recommendations to make now and two sell recommendations.
I think that interest rates are starting to peak. I think that the inflation bandwagon is here. I was writing a little bit about that in December 2021. I think it's time to position a bit defensively as growth, at least as evidenced by GDP, is going to start to slow down a bit relative to what we saw in 2021. I have a recommendation for that.
I also have a couple of recommendations to get some money outside of the US. It's a big world out there and you need exposure to emerging markets and other continents.
One in a fast-growing Asian country that’s not threatening to raise rates like the Federal Reserve is doing here in the United States. In fact, the Central Bank in this Asian country is promising to keep rates low and its GDP is growing fast.
Then I have a recommendation in Europe, which also isn't facing the same slowdown as I think the US is about to face.
So a couple of new recommendations to get positioned for that coming slowdown in the US.
It’s all in the January issue of Foundational Profits, which you can access here.