Contents

Excerpt

Preface

After thirteen years of working with retail and institutional accounts for a major Wall Street firm in Seattle, Washington, I decided to take a break. That’s how this book came about. In discussions with people from all over the Pacific Northwest, I discovered that for every person who is caught up in the daily activities of Wall Street, there are many more who don’t want to spend one ounce of energy on it but still demand a successful investment portfolio. These are the people who are passionately involved with their families and careers and enjoy spending their creative energies in places other than the stock market. For these investors, an investment story much different from Wall Street’s traditional story needs to be told.

As global markets become more uncertain, and sources of financial information proliferate, there is a common belief that increased time and attention to one’s investments is required to successfully navigate among more than 20,000 stocks and mutual funds when building and maintaining an investment portfolio. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, it has been shown time and again that excessive attention to investment portfolios combined with advice from stock market experts frequently results in sub-par performance. Yet many of the people I talked with were astonished to hear this, that is, until I shared with them the story of The Coffeehouse Investor.

The fact is, there are ways to simplify your investment decisions when building a sophisticated portfolio. With just a minimum of effort you can learn to implement these steps and begin the gratifying process of building wealth, ignoring Wall Street and getting on with your life. As you do so, you will discover that the real benefit to simplifying your investment decisions is that you are able to focus more attention on areas of life that enrich you the most.

It is early Friday morning and I’m sitting at the corner table of my favorite coffeehouse, finishing this preface. As I search inward for inspiration, I stare out the window and see that the front-page headlines of the daily newspaper, propped on the sidewalk stand, is screaming “RUSSIAN ECONOMY SOCKS DOW – market sees 357-point plunge.”

Finally, something to divert our attention from the financial crisis in Japan. Or is it Malaysia? Or North Korea? I forget. Meanwhile, the weatherman is predicting nothing but sunshine for the weekend. With a forecast like that, who has time to fret about who’s socking whom? This is Seattle. I’m outta here.