Meanwhile, a simple investment strategy based on the game of golf could be putting profit in the pockets of shell-shocked investors. If they only knew how easy it could be.

Say you put $10,000 in an S&P 500 index fund back on January 3, 2000.

Congratulations, by the end of July 2007 you would have made about a thousand bucks over the past 7 1/2 years. That would buy you and your significant other just about one good round of golf a year.

On a public course.

Walking.

Meanwhile, the investment strategy contained in the book Go for the Green: Golf Strategies for Successful Investing would have nearly doubled your original investment.

Some folks are watching CNBC and sweating bullets.

Some of us are playing golf.

——————————————–

Let’s get this straight right from the start. I’m not a great golfer. I’m not even a good golfer. “Golfer” is a term used liberally in my case. So, it should be clear by now that you’re going to buy this book to get any golf tips, right?

Here’s another thing: investment books are boring. Even as a topic of conversation, investing has lost its shelf-life. Sure, back in the Nineties people loved to talk about their tech stocks – but hey, let’s not go there.

The fact of the matter is: I love golf. I don’t play as much as I want, but when I have the opportunity, it is a pleasure truly appreciated.

And the other fact is: I manage investments. I’m a Vice President and Senior Investment Specialist for a Wall-Street based investment firm, yet I don’t work on Wall Street. Instead, my clientele is comprised of very successful business owners, foundations, institutions and wealthy families in the mid-South.

Mild weather. Beautiful scenery. Rubbing elbows with the affluent. Sounds like a job where you would play lots of golf, doesn’t it? Yeah, I know. I’m gonna work on that.

I’m also a Certified Financial Planner. That means I’m a big believer in goal-based investing. Identify needs, target specific portfolio returns and hold your investments (and your investment advisor) accountable for results.

Let me tell you something I’ve noticed: in meetings with clients, if I ask how’s their golf game, I’ll get an excited report on a memorable last outing, a near hole-in-one, or just a recent round with a great group of friends on a beautiful course. Ask them about their investment portfolio and that client will practically stop breathing. So as conversation topics go — golf: good, investing: bad.

I promise, it’s true. People can whip a golf score-card out of their purse or back pocket, but ask them to produce last month’s investment statement and you’ll get a blank stare. (Usually that statement is buried at the bottom of a junk-drawer somewhere, unopened).

And then, the thought occurred to me: what if we could combine the fervor of a good golf conversation with a sound investment strategy? After all, the better your investments pay off, the more golf you can play, right?

That’s what this book is all about.

Americans spend hundreds of dollars on golf lessons, but have no idea how to invest their 401(k) – and seem unwilling to learn, even if that advice is offered at no charge. Over $4 billion is spent annually on golf equipment in the U.S., and yet the typical investor couldn’t tell you how much they pay in mutual fund fees.

A golfer surely knows his pitching wedge from a putter, but would struggle to explain the difference between a mutual fund and a municipal bond. Million dollar homes are built alongside sprawling golf resorts, anchored by luxurious clubhouses and rich amenities – and yet the median value of an American retirement account is just $27,000.

Even the richest-of-the-rich are whiffing it: paying hidden fees that drag down the performance of their portfolios; using investment strategies that are tax inefficient and legacy-lame.

Go for the Green: The Golf Strategy to Successful Investing combines the elements of the game of golf with easy to understand investment tools and proven strategies of building and maintaining wealth — explaining the intricacies of investing with metaphors drawn from the links. It’s an entertaining and practical guide to making money using a base of reference the weekend duffer – even the non-golfer – can understand and appreciate.

Go for the Green: The Golf Strategy to Successful Investing will be published soon. If you would like to be notified by email when the book becomes available, just drop a quick line to golfequalsrich@gmail.com.

Using sophisticated quant analysis, overweighting emerging markets and managing real estate and private equity exposure, the nation’s largest college endowment garnered an impressive one-year return of 23%.

The Golf Portfolio, as featured in the book Go for the Green: Golf Strategies for Successful Investing, returned just under 21.6% for the same one-year period.

• Harvard, three-year annualized return: 18.4%
• Golf portfolio, three years, annualized: 19.37%
• Harvard, five-year annualized return: 18.4%
• Golf portfolio, five years, annualized: 18.94%

So, you could utilize a staff of 175 of the brightest minds in America — many paid multi-million dollar salaries — to develop sophisticated macroeconomic models exploiting global imbalances, market inefficiencies and interest rate conundrums with hedge funds, commodities, foreign debt and non-correlated equities — implemented in nearly 11,000 separate fund accounts…

…or you could just play golf.

And what resources do we find on the shelves to assist in this endeavor? Books that promise simple solutions, but really offer more confusion and technical jargon.

Consider some recent offerings:

Rule #1 by Phil Town – The book promises successful investing in “fifteen minutes a week” but really requires in-depth security analysis and the monitoring of three technical indicators before deploying the strategy: moving averages, convergence/divergence and stochastics. Rather than fifteen minutes, the author – on page 282 – recommends four to ten hours of research on every potential investment, and that’s a list of 30 to 40 stocks! So much for having some time to play golf.

Real Money by James Cramer — The CNBC “Mad Money” television investment guru and former hedge-fund operator advocates stock-picking and market timing – admonishing the investor to spend at least an hour a week in “homework” for every stock they own. The website www.cramerwatch.org pits Cramer’s stock picks with those of a monkey name Leonard. The monkey is winning.

The Little Book That Beats the Market by Joel Greenblatt — This book features another deep-value security evaluation process – a so-called “magic formula” that the author admits may not work over the “short-term” – a time period defined as being as much as three to five years. Well, good luck with that retirement.

Go for the Green: The Golf Strategy to Successful Investing will be published soon. If you would like to be notified by email when the book becomes available, just drop a quick line to golfequalsrich@gmail.com.

I’d like you to meet Bud, our very own course marshal. As you can see, Bud is carrying a small – but very powerful – compressed air-horn. These are often used to signal the beginning of simultaneous play for group golf outings (or “scrambles”) and also may alert players of approaching bad weather — lightning and such.

Today, Bud will be utilizing his air-horn to alert us whenever this book starts to drift too far into investment jargon, arcane strategies or simple boredom.

You see, this will be an investment book for people that don’t usually read investment books. And Bud is here to make sure we don’t get tedious.

We’re going to use the game of golf to illustrate effective investment strategies. We picked golf, but really could have used any number of sports, hobbies or recreational activities: football, basketball, NASCAR – you get the idea. Hmmm. I smell a sequel.

Golf really is the perfect analogy for the investment process. A day on the course can be relaxing, but it can also be quite frustrating — just like attempting to make money in the stock market. However, we are going to take a relaxing approach, so we’ll be the golfers that aren’t that serious about the game. But, we are serious about making money. On the golf course, we’ll enjoy each other’s company, love being outdoors surrounded by the manicured beauty of an immaculate course and we won’t get too upset when we whiff the ball or slam a giant slice into the woods.

And that means non-golfers can ride in the cart and enjoy the afternoon, as well. So, even if you’ve never played the game – never put your money in the stock or bond markets – or, if you are a scratch golfer and a seasoned investor, this should be an enjoyable outing.

If not, Bud here will give us a nice little blast on his air-horn. You want to give that thing a little test, Bud?

BRWHANNNNHHHHHHHHH!

Wow. That is one loud, obnoxious noise. Let’s hope we won’t hear it again.

“Wall Street people learn nothing and forget everything.”
– Legendary deep-value investor and Warren Buffett mentor, Benjamin Graham

It’s a beautiful day out here on the golf course. I’m glad we got here early. There’s brilliant sunshine, a light spritz of dew on the grass and no loud foursomes on the tee box yet. We’ve got plenty of time before we tee-off. Let’s chat for a moment.

Before we start our little lesson, I can tell by your constant fidgeting that you’re a bit eager. Or, perhaps you’ve had too much coffee this morning? Well anyway, I’m sure you are curious about this whole Golf Strategy to Investing thing. You’ve seen all those other books on the shelves promising easy riches with “magic” formulas to investing: You Can Beat the Street with Rule #1 using the Nine Steps to Financial Freedom and be an Automatic Millionaire as a Rich Dad not a Poor Dad. That sort of stuff.

So, we’re going to start at the end of the book. That way you don’t have to flip to the back and see how it all works out.

I’m guessing you want to know two things: can I make you money — and how much? Right? And you don’t want to be bored.

Well then, let’s get right to it. Just how has the Golf Strategy to Investing performed over the last several years of a difficult market? Let’s take a look at the scorecard. We’ll back-test our portfolio to a very memorable time in the stock and bond markets…

The Scorecard

Let’s go back to January 3, 2000. It’s the first trading day of the New Year, and our hopes are high. We’ve just rung-in the New Millennium. We’re all breathing a sigh of relief, having dodged that big Y2K disaster. Whew! Canned goods, anyone?

The Dow Jones Industrial Average is at 11,357. The S&P 500 is standing tall at 1455. The NASDAQ is gaining steam at 4131 – ready to top 5000 in just a few weeks. The 30-year bond is at a two-year high, yielding over 6½%. Good times.

Merrill Lynch technology analyst Henry Blodget (oh yes, we do remember him, don’t we?) has just issued an optimistic forecast — a strong year ahead for tech stocks! Oh boy! – let’s jump in! AOL is over $82. (Business Week has just named AOL’s Bob Pittman and Steve Case as “Men of the Century.” Even the sky is no limit for the $183 billion merger of AOL and Time Warner!) Yahoo! at $475. WorldCom is $45 and Salomon Smith Barney’s analyst Jack Grubman says it will be in the $90 range within 12 months.

Enron’s stock is hovering around $40, by late summer it will top $90.

Say you had $100,000 invested on that cold day in January 2000. Within weeks you would want to mortgage your house, scour for change in the sofa, hock your car – do anything you could do to add to your stock holdings. You were gonna be rich!

We all know what happened within just a few short months.

Fast forward: if that $100,000 had been in an S&P500 index fund, after seven years it would have been worth just under $114,500 by the end of 2006. That’s less than a 2% average annual return. And that’s after a four-year market rebound! Ouch. Of course, some people are just happy to be back to break-even.

If you had just played your investment 4-iron (we’ll explain that concept in a minute) like so many investors did in the late ‘90’s and early 2000, your $100,000 would still have been down over 18% by the end of ’06. If you hadn’t sold out in disgust along the way. Remember those Janus funds you once owned? If you were still holding on to them, the results were even worse. (Anybody nodding their heads?)

In December of 2006, your 9-iron (I know, be patient) would have made you a cumulative 15% profit — after a three-year bear (down) market, and a four-year bull (up) market. However, if had been using the Janus Venture fund as your 9-iron, you would have lost nearly half of your money during the same seven-year period. Talk about frustrating!

Had you read this book (I guess that means I would have had to written it too, huh?) back on January 3, 2000 and — by some twisted quirk of fate, against all odds, denying all normal traits of mankind, defying even your most basic instincts – had put your entire bag of clubs to work and invested your $100,000 in The Golf Strategy, at the end of 2006 you would have over $179,000 to show for it. That’s a cumulative return of nearly 80%. Instead of earning less than a 2% annual return during that seven-year period with your S&P 500 index fund – or losing nearly half your money (or more) in your high-risk mutual fund – you would have earned more than an 8½% average annual return – with very little effort: just an easy swing and a good follow-through.

Imagine if you can weather the worst of market-cycles and make money – think of how you’ll do in the best of markets! For example, when the S&P 500 hit bottom and then bounced back at the beginning of 2003, it gained over 63% in four years: $100,000 invested in the S&P 500 at that perfect moment of market inflection would have grown to a little more than $163,000 by the end of 2006. With our Golf Strategy bag of investments your portfolio would have grown to nearly $186,000 – a 23% additional return. And the best part? There is no stock analysis or technical charts involved, no complicated formulas. Instead of agonizing over your investments, you can put all that extra effort into your golf game.

Now you’re really ready to get started, huh?

Go for the Green: The Golf Strategy to Successful Investing will be published soon. If you would like to be notified by email when the book becomes available, just drop a quick line to golfequalsrich@gmail.com.