Happy new year!
My name is Jason Kelly. In 1997, I wrote the first edition of The Neatest Little Guide to Stock Market Investing to teach people how to profit in the market by managing their own accounts. It’s a bestseller currently in its fifth edition. Over the years, I’ve met many of the book’s readers and discovered that most didn’t want to become part-time stock traders, but just wanted to find the optimal way to manage their retirement accounts. So, two years ago I wrote a book dedicated to that topic. It’s called The 3% Signal.
The 3% Signal (3Sig) is an investing plan that beats the general stock market by moving money into or out of a stock fund in your 401(k) once per quarter based on the price of the fund only. When the fund grows 3% in a quarter, you do nothing. When it grows more than 3%, you sell the surplus profit and move it into a safe bond fund. When it grows less than 3% or falls in value, you use money from the safe bond fund to buy the stock fund up to the 3% growth line.
This simple action, using the clarity of prices alone, guides you to buy more of the stock fund when its price is cheap, and sell some of it when its price is expensive. The bigger the shortfall, the more you buy. The bigger the surplus, the more you sell. Because it requires just two types of funds that are commonly available, it works in any 401(k).
This unemotional method — powered by prices, not opinion — beats the market. In so doing, it beats most professional advisors because the majority of them loses to the market.
The plan reduces investing stress by eliminating the need to monitor financial news and opinion, which issue conflicting advice based on “gut instinct” and other unreliable intuition. A key form of investing stress, the type caused by indecision, is eliminated by following the quarterly signal, which specifies how many shares to buy or sell.
The 3% Signal is perfectly suited to your 401(k) plan, which was rated as one of America’s best in Bloomberg’s most recent annual ranking (the beginning of which is pictured above). In fact, it’s because you work for one of the top 20 companies on the list that you saw an announcement that brought you here to see information that I know can help you retire with more money at your disposal. Your company offers an excellent 401(k) with a variety of fund choices. In any account, including yours, the funds that are ideal for the 3Sig plan are:
- Small Company Stock Index Fund
Usable volatility and growth
Low expense ratio - Bond Market Index Fund
Safe harbor for money used to buy weakness in the stock fund
Low expense ratio
To help you put the two funds to work in your plan in 2016, I’m offering a free 3Sig Quick Start Guide. This one-page primer will brighten your financial future in four short steps. I also offer a free 3Sig Calculator, which makes it easy to generate your plan’s signals, and it can email you every quarterly action. If you keep these emails in a folder, you’ll build your own personal retirement plan history as the quarters go by.
The guide and calculator are free on the 3Sig Tools page.
I know people are skeptical of information found online. You might be wondering why I’m giving away the guide and allowing free access to the calculator. Let me explain.
I hope you’ll decide after looking over the free guide and calculator that you want to buy The 3% Signal book. Then, I hope you’ll decide after reading the book that you want to subscribe to The Kelly Letter, which shows in every Sunday morning issue how your plan of rational reaction is running circles around breathless media coverage. Believe me, the less time you spend reading “Ten Things Every Investor Must Know About The Market Now!” the better off you’ll be.
To encourage you to become a premium reader of mine, I’ll ship you a free copy of The 3% Signal if you subscribe to The Kelly Letter for one year. To learn more about this offer, please click this image:
So, that’s what’s in it for me and what I hope you’ll eventually decide to do. There’s no pressure, though. The guide and calculator are yours for free, as promised. I hope they help you start this year right.
I wish you well with your improved 401(k)! If you have questions, please reach me via the Contact page. If you would like me to review your specific 401(k) details to help you select which two funds to use in your 3Sig plan, just send me the 401(k) info as a PDF attachment.
Good luck and, once again, happy new year!
Yours truly,
