Peace of Mind Planning

Projects

It is my belief that this book will be the last book I’ll write in a series of books about how to protect and grow a person’s wealth.

This book has been several years in the making.

It is my belief that this book will be the last book I’ll write in a series of books about how to protect and grow a person’s wealth. Only time will tell if that is the case.

My previous books are as follows:

Bad Advisors: How to Identify Them; How to Avoid Them (www.badadvisors.com).
Retiring Without Risk (www.retiringwithoutrisk.com).
The Home Equity Acceleration Plan (H.E.A.P.)
(www.heaplan.com)
The Home Equity Management Guidebook
The Doctor’s Wealth Preservation Guide

Many topics covered in the above-listed books will be covered in this book. I won’t be able to cover them in as much detail, but I will touch on them so you can understand the importance of each.

If you find certain topics not fully discussed in this book important for your individual situation, you can pick up one of my other books; or you might try surfing the web for more information. Although, be careful with what you read on the web.

Challenge

1) It really boils down to whether you agree with the following statement:

Investors should take the least amount of risk to reach their investment goals

If you do not agree with that statement, then you really have no business reading or caring about what’s in this book.

Page 31 of the book.

Solution

2) The pain index quantifies three measures simultaneously:

the depth,
the duration
the frequency of losses

As a metric of capital preservation, the pain index differs

from other metrics of downside risk, which focuses upon volatility or losses vs. a benchmark. Once established, the pain index can be utilized in a return vs. risk trade-off metric.

page 36.

The Results

3) Maximum drawdown is defined as the maximum percentage loss from:

An investment peak to a negative trough after the peak. The following chart of SPY (SPDR S&P 500 ETF) between 2005 to the end of 2012 shows the maximum drawdown of this period (-55.2%) as well as the secondary large drawdown (-18.6%) in 2011.

In English please…ok, so, from 2005 to 2012, the S&P 500 generated an average rate of return of 4.9%. To generate that ROR, the investor had to risk a 55% loss over that time frame.

If your financial planner said to you that you could achieve an average rate of return of 4.9% and that you “only” had to risk 55% of your money to do so, would you take that investment? NO WAY!

Page 47

Wealth Preservation