On January 30, 2015, I finally opened up my first Motif Investing portfolio with $10,000. I waited until the end of January because I felt there was a lot of uncertainty in the market (there still is), and I was also taking my sweet time doing research on the 30 companies and ETFs I wanted to purchase.

Goals For Investing

1) To fully experience the Motif Investing interface to know about the good and the bad as an investor and as a consultant to make suggestions for further improvement.

2) To deploy $10,000 worth of cash that was just sitting in my bank account in order to make more than a lousy 0.1% interest. I’ve made it a habit of investing some amount of money in the stock market through my SEP IRA, 401k, Solo 401k, private wealth management account, or online brokerage account every month for over 10 years. I suggest doing the same as you’ll be surprised how quickly your balances add up!

3) To finally build a legitimate portfolio in an after-tax brokerage account, instead of just speculating on one to three stocks at a time. The portfolio is a comprehensive growth-oriented, special situations portfolio which is supposed to be diversified enough where rebalancing more than once a quarter is NOT necessary. I’m no longer actively looking for home run stocks because I’ve already built my financial nut. Instead, I’m looking for moderate growth in the 7%-12% range for my overall portfolio.

4) To follow the financial markets more carefully. From 1999 – 2012, I spent 5 – 10 hours a day reading investment research, watching financial news, reading financial news, following global politics, monitoring economic indicators, dialing into conference calls, and speaking about companies with clients. Then I’d start going for days without checking anything at all because I was so focused on building my online business. Having an active investment portfolio helps keep my mind sharp so I can make more intelligent investments, and be more knowledgeable when talking to others in the industry.

5) To create a community based investment portfolio. Back in 2010, I actually created a fictitious fund called The Samurai Fund made up by stocks picks from the community. It was fantastic fun that blew away the S&P 500 index thanks to crowdsourcing. For example, my pick was ticker symbol SAM of course, the Boston Beer Company that produces Samuel Adams beer. I bought the stock at $46.60, when the market cap was at $668. The share price is now at a whopping $272 with a market cap of $3.54 billion for a return of 483%!

There are plenty of investment enthusiasts reading Financial Samurai, and I’d love to engage all of your thoughts about the markets, the current positions in the motif, and what trades should be made, if any. Perhaps we can all become better investors and make more money if we put our heads together because it’s hard to keep track of everything, all the time. We can essentially create an investment club with ongoing discussion in the comments section of these quarterly posts. 

One of the questions I asked in my accredited investor post is whether the current definition of accredited investor is fair or not. 61% of you voted that the Securities And Exchange Commission (SEC) should not dictate who can and cannot invest in private offerings. Only 31% of you said the definition is currently fair, while the other 8% voted the SEC should raise the income and net worth limits.

As expected, some people shared their frustration in the comments section.

There was surprisingly little debate regarding my passive income investment rankings. Figuring out the five factor scores for each of the seven investments took about 10 hours to produce, so perhaps I was thorough enough to address all the points. Everybody agreed that dividend investing is one of the best ways to generate passive income. The two main investments that had the most discussion were Real Estate and Creating Your Own Product.

The pushback on real estate investing is that it feels too much like work. When you’re trying to find the perfect tenant and keep up with property taxes, real estate can feel like a bear. Meanwhile, nobody disagreed with Creating Your Own Product as being a top passive income generating asset. However, I just didn’t get the sense that anybody really got motivated to start creating something.

In this short post, I want to demonstrate via some charts and logical reasoning the power of purchasing rental property and creating a product.

Oil is a popular topic due to its surprising ~60% price drop from June 2014 to 1Q2016. Nobody could have imagined such a quick collapse in oil. I certainly didn’t when I decided to buy a Honda Fit instead of a Jeep Grand Cherokee Limited last summer! If I had known I could pump my rolling 4th bedroom for less than $2.50 a gallon, I might very well have opted for the bigger car.

Given knowing what the hell is going on in the world is part of being a functioning citizen in today’s society, I decided to do some research into what happened. After all, I did purchase the oil ETF USO, a couple major integrated oil companies, an airline stock, and some auto stocks in my newest diversified investment portfolio for 2015 to try and make some money.

So what caused this significant drop to ~$30/barrel, and how does this affect businesses, the economy, and our everyday lives? Is oil poised to rise once again? Let’s explore these questions and more.

One goal after leaving my corporate job of 11 years in 2012 was to learn more about the startup industry in Silicon Valley. I was coming from the old school finance industry where there was relatively little innovation compared to many financial technology companies today. Life was getting a little boring and I kept watching company after company we took public grow into great successes.

One of those companies was Google. I remember being excited seeing Sergei Brin, one of Google’s founders give a lunch presentation in downtown San Francisco during their IPO roadshow back in August, 2004. It was standing room only, so I wasn’t able to eat one of the manufactured plates of rubber chicken. We were one of the lead book runners, and I was inspired at how quickly Sergei, Larry and team were able to build something so huge, so quickly.

We are living in the golden age of tech/internet innovation. Five years ago, at age 32, I told myself that if I didn’t create something internet-related on my own or join a startup while having so much access living in San Francisco, I would kick myself in the face when I’m old.

Today, Google is one of my largest sources of traffic and revenue for Financial Samurai. Maybe it’s good karma for helping them go public, even though the IPO seemed shaky at the time with the last minute price decision of $85/share. Yes, we all should have piled in back then! It’s crazy how life comes full circle.

I discovered Sliced Investing on AngelList while vacationing up in Tahoe over Christmas break. With my tag-line “Slicing Through Money’s Mysteries,” I wondered if destiny was calling once again as I shot the founders a note to say I’m interested in helping them out. They kindly responded, and here I am.

I wrote off hedge fund investing until 2015 because I didn’t have the $500,000+ minimums to invest. It was just as well since the markets have been on fire since 2009 and hedge funds have underperformed. But in a way, I have been creating my own equity hedged portfolio with my accumulation of structured products since 2012. Give me 5-10% returns every year with low volatility, and I’ll happily invest all I can.

Sliced Investing smartly crowd-sources investor capital in order to make investing in hedge funds and alternatives more accessible to more people due to their minimum investment of $20,000. With the bull market entering its sixth year, I’m beginning to wonder how much more this baby can run. I’ll take under a 10% return for the S&P 500 for 2015 if anybody wants to take the other side of the bet!

In this interview, I want to understand the mindset of an entrepreneur. We’ll talk about risk-taking, the why, and how things came to be with Mike Furlong and Akhil Lodha, founders of Sliced Investing. I’ve got to imagine many people would love to be their own bosses and create a company one day as well.