In 2021, Cathie Wood was the talk of the town.
Her flagship Ark Innovation Fund (ARKK) trounced the S&P 500.
Currently, the ARKK is down 25.6% over the last three years compared to the S&P 500 gain of 8.7%.
While fund managers might beat the indexes in any given year, maybe even two consecutive years, according to S&P Global, once you extend that out to five years, most underperform the markets.
And after 15 years, the list turns into a ghost town.
This shouldn’t shock anyone who doesn’t have “20” before the year they were born.
We’ve known for years that financial advisors and money managers don’t live up to all the hype.
These are the same folks that want you to believe it’s not possible to beat the market as an individual — that you face an insurmountable disadvantage.
Here’s why that’s complete B.S., and how even someone with minimal knowledge and experience can beat the markets.
It’s Not About Intelligence
In 1994, John Meriwether, a former trading star of Solomon Brothers, formed Long-Term Capital Management with Nobel Prize-winning economists Myron Scholes and Robert C. Merton.
These guys used sophisticated mathematical models and quantitative strategies the likes of which Wall Street had never seen.
Four years later, the fund blew up. Its use of heavy leverage on arbitrage plays fell apart in the face of a Russian financial crisis. They lost $4.6 billion in less than four months.
Roger Lowenstein documented this episode in his well-known book “When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management.”
If you’ve never read the book, do yourself a favor and check it out. It’s a fascinating look at the hubris of genius.
It also highlights one interesting conclusion that explains why mild-mannered Warren Buffett has been so successful for decades.
It’s About Common Sense
Warren Buffett invested in what he knew.
It kept him out of many technology companies.
But he knew what he knew, and he knew it well.
Buffett isn’t some super genius who speaks 30 languages or can recite pi out to 150 digits.
He’s patient.
He waits for opportunities.
And that’s what sets him apart from every other fund manager.
It’s true that we, as individuals, have advantages over the big guys.
When Buffett takes a position, he does it over time. Pouring billions into a company can move the stock.
Most of us can click a buy order to snap up shares of whatever we want and get a fill in a split second. If we suddenly realize we screwed up, we sell.
Big money doesn’t have that flexibility. When they decide to move, they have to commit.
That’s where patience comes into play.
If you follow someone like Warren Buffett, you’ll notice how he strikes out every few years. He’s not someone to make a new deal every six-12 months.
Can you say the same thing?
When was the last time you waited even a month to pick up shares of that stock you wanted?
We’re not saying that patience means you sit on your hands for months at a time.
That’s not necessary unless you’re trying to move billions around.
However, we’re pointing out what you’ve known all along — forcing opportunities isn’t the same thing as finding them.
Hedge fund managers either perform or lose clients, a fear that presses them to act when they otherwise wouldn’t.
The only one making the same demands of us is ourselves.
Take that away, and you learn to strike when the iron is hot, while also recognizing and stepping away when it’s not.
Take Bryan Perry for example.
As a Wall Street veteran, Bryan has traded through bull and bear markets. He’s seen investors drive stocks higher with unrealistic expectations and sell everything they own in sheer panic.
After watching this madness for years, he realized he didn’t need to wait for the overall market to hit extremes to find these trades. He just needed more opportunities.
He noticed that within the options market there were similar short-term conditions identical to these market manias.
These weren’t trades that hedge funds or big money players would care about. But they were PERFECT for the average trader.
This was the premise behind his Eight-Month Millionaire Blueprint.
You see, the stock market may only consist of several thousand stocks. But a stock like Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) can have hundreds, if not thousands, of options trading at any given time.
And there are several hundred stocks with options that trade every single day, creating tens of thousands of possibilities.
Rather than having to wait months or years, Bryan’s able to identify multiple opportunities every day.
From there, it’s just a matter of whittling them down to the best ones and having the patience for them to hit the right price.
This is the entire reason why someone like Bryan successfully trades the market, while a bunch of MIT grads managing a California pension fund can’t even match the performance of the S&P 500.
All it takes is the ability to recognize the advantages you have, applying a little common sense and then having the patience to wait for opportunities to present themselves.
Now, maybe that sounds good to you, but you’re not sure of exactly how to start, or what that even looks like.
That’s why we’re extending a limited-time offer to join Bryan Perry’s Eight-Month Millionaire Blueprint.
With it, you’ll get a chance to test0-drive Bryan’s service and see how he locates these opportunities and why they work.
It’s more than just entry and profit taking signals.
It’s a chance to finally understand how to take the advantages you possess as an investor and build a strategy to beat the markets once and for all.
