The topic of this newsletter is skepticism. Financially, you will throughout your life be given offers that at first glance seem excessively wonderful. Now sometimes they are actually wonderful, but often they’re not. Most financial opportunities are a mix of good and bad. Perhaps the opportunity is incredibly risky or the person providing the offer is a crook. One phrase that is often used in the fiancé world is “There is no such thing as a free lunch”. The statement means that when something appears too good to be true, it often is. We are not going to say free lunches are impossible but you do need to treat those situations with a discerning eye.

You need to be skeptical/cynical. To protect yourself, here a few questions you can ask. 1. Why isn’t everyone taking advantage of this opportunity? There are a lot of smart people out there, wouldn’t they be clamoring for this opportunity if it truly had no downsides? 2. In regards to the person making the offer to you, how are they making money? What’s in it for them? Are they earning a commission? 3. Do you understand the opportunity or are you completely reliant on the person making the offer to explain it to you?

One investment idea that is fairly common in the investment world is that you should stay within a circle of competency. If you invest in something outside it, you are pretty much guaranteed to be confused and confused people make bad investment decisions. When you’re trying to enter an area that you don’t understand, scammers can smell your ignorance. You are completely dependent on this other person’s honesty and sense of decency. Also, sometimes a seller can be honest, (they think the product is great), but the seller is also very dumb. You need knowledge to be able to evaluate the situation. For example, very few people (if any) really understood crypto but many were seduced by the wild profit projections. Bad move. There are many other examples in real estate, high tech/bio stocks, etc. We are not saying don’t do it. We are saying stick to what you know.

You need to do your due diligence. How does the opportunity make you money? What are the risks? How much does it cost? When those opportunities come along, you need to do research. You need to know enough so you’re not exploited. Take everything with a grain of salt.

If you have any questions about your investments, please call at any time. We sincerely hope you got value from this newsletter.

We appreciate your business and trust.

Thank-You

Dan and Eli

As we’re writing these to help our readers, we would be very appreciative of any input in regards to what we should write next. If you want us to write about a particular topic, please contact me. Please contact me if you would like to submit a post to our blog.

If anything that we mentioned above interests you, please consider downloading our free e-book. The book contains our thoughts on investment management and some information that we think everyone should know. You can also download it below.