What is ETF Yourself All About?
The long and the short of it is that I (Rob Isbitts) have spent 30+ years in the investment industry and I have a strong belief that a tactical and contemporary approach leveraging ETFs is what is needed to invest for yourself.
At ETF Yourself, market analysis, investment strategy, and ETF research come together.
There is so much financial and investing “stuff” out there, it can get pretty noisy. So as we transition to our second year and the upgraded version of ETF Yourself, we thought about who we are doing this for. We’ve said it many times: we are not a mass-market research firm.
How do I know if ETF Yourself is right for me?
“Likes” and “followers” don’t mean very much to us. Extending the breadth and depth of my hands-on investment experience does not have a target audience size attached to it. While anyone is free to sign up for either our full service or ETF Yourself segment of it, we think our best work is done not for the masses, but for those within the masses who can say “yes” to several of these questions:
I have done enough investing of my own money to have a good sense of what I want from my portfolio: how much risk I’m willing to take, and how I want my portfolio to behave in different types of market environments.
I’ve tried low-cost newsletters (under $500/year) and realized that while there might be some hidden gems, most are driven by sales hype, urgency, and appealing to the old reliable human emotion: greed. I want something different.
I had or still have a financial planner, but I think that often, there are 2 very different parts to the value of such professionals. Financial planning expertise is valuable and worth paying for. But it is less about my level of “assets under management” and more of a fixed annual value. And so while I might have a financial planner, the science and art of “portfolio management” and my investment process are a separate topic for me. And I want to do some or all of that myself, rather than pay a percent of assets for it.
I no longer want to pay an asset-based fee for what is often an outsourced, "traditional" portfolio mix. For me paying a filet mignon price for more of a Spam quality portfolio is not for me.
I want to add structure and process to all of the information I consume about investing and markets. I follow some investing "experts" on social media, trying to be my own money manager. But even though I’ve found some good ones, I want to take the next step to build, maintain and monitor my own portfolio.
What About the World Beyond ETFs?
ETF Yourself is one sleeve of Sungarden Investment Research. Individual stocks and options play a key role for more tenured investors and Sungarden Investment Research provides access to Rob’s proprietary, model-signal portfolio, comprised of stocks, options, as well as ETFs.
For those looking to expand beyond the world of ETFs, check out Sungarden's Investment Group on Seeking Alpha.
