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William Bernstein is fascinating in more ways than one. He began his career as a neurologist and then transitioned to being a financial theorist and money manager. Add the dozen-odd books he has authored, and you get an extremely prolific writer. One analogy that he presented during an interview stuck. Investing is like losing weight. To lose weight, you have to exercise more, eat less and eat right. Simple, but not easy. To become wealthy, you have to save more, spend less, and invest right. Simple, but not easy. His thoughts and writings have a place in any serious conversation about investing. Yet, they are elegant in their simplicity. One of them being the four pillars of investing. According to him, mastery of them can result in a coherent strategy that will enable individuals to accomplish investing’s primary aims: achieving and maintaining financial independence and sleeping well at night. A deficiency in any of them will torpedo your investment plan. The below has been e

There are no market geniuses. Just those savvy in controlling their emotions. You can never get wealthy if you let emotion get the better of you. But if you rein in your impulses, you have a very good shot to accumulate wealth. When the market is bullish, everyone is on an investing spree. Along comes the inevitable correction, and those very funds are kicked to the curb. What has changed? Just sentiment. If the market falls on a certain day, fear dominates and investors are reluctant to invest. Once the market bounces back, greed takes over. Ironically is, investors perceive an investment to be more risky when nobody is buying and the price (NAV) is low, and less risky when everyone is buying and the price (NAV) is high. Laughable isn't it? How does one counter the impulse to act? Give thought to your Investment. Value investing is about buying a stock or fund quoting less than its intrinsic value. If you make a purchase higher than its intrinsic value, you are looking at the

*What Are Alpha And Beta In Investing?* As their names would imply, alpha and beta are fundamental terms in the investing world. In its most popular understanding, alpha represents the excess return on a particular investment—a stock, mutual fund or exchange-traded fund—over a relevant index. In other words, if an investor has managed to outperform a certain index, such as the S&P 500, it is said he or she has achieved "alpha." Beta, by contrast, measures an asset's historic volatility relative to a market benchmark, such as the S&P 500, which has an alpha and a beta of 1.0 because it is considered to be a proxy for the overall stock market. If a stock or fund's beta is 2, for example, that means that it has historically been twice as volatile as the benchmark index, while a beta below 1.0 would indicate that is less volatile than the market. The simplest way to differentiate between alpha and beta is to remember that alpha measures relative

*Every Financial Services Intermediary should read this and practice to be successful.* Here’s a list I use now on a daily basis as a reminder to increase my happiness: *1. Give yourself permission.* Permission to be who you are. Permission to laugh big, to cry when you need to, to fail brilliantly, to make stuff. Permission to fall apart, breakdown, and get back up again. Permission to be different and unique. Permission to go too far and reach your dreams. *2. Don’t take yourself so seriously.* Hold yourself with a “light hand.” Laugh at your foibles with amusement. When things get tough or stress arises, lift your shoulders with an “oh well…” Know that it’s never as big or life devastating as your mind thinks. Happy people trust that whatever glitch happens will work itself out. Happy people give a “Ha! Ha!” and a “So what? Who cares? Big Deal! Why not?” when meet with resistances. *3. Don’t self-ruminate*. I remember a friend of mine