Sage Investors

IT’S TIME TO GROW UP AND START INVESTING

You’ve come to the realization that if you are going to have some financial security in your life, you will need to grow your savings more meaningfully by investing.

Your infrastructure is in place. You’ve opened up a brokerage account, installed the app on your smartphone and you’re good to go, ready to buy and sell stocks.

Now what.

How do you figure out what stocks to invest in? When do you sell a stock?

You’ve taken some investing books out of the library, followed some investing experts on social media and tried to get some tips from people in your social circle. You get bogged down by the terminology and volume of information.

 Forward P/E ratios, Free Cash Flows. Exchange Traded Funds. What is this?

You’re overwhelmed.

You venture on and eventually settle on a few stocks because your friends and family are doing it. You buy them but you feel really indecisive and not too confident about the decisions you’ve made.

You tell yourself, there has to be a better way to do this.

You’re not alone.

I want to tell you that investing is a lot easier than what the industry makes it out to be. You don’t need to get an MBA or memorize 100’s of formulas to be a successful investor.  If you can grasp some basic principles about investing, you have a really good chance of making good decisions and make your savings grow meaningfully.

Wouldn’t it be great if you can work with a resource that will teach you the principles of making good investment decisions and provide you with a sensible, easy to use framework that will allow increase your chances of investing success rather throwing darts at wall?

I can help you.

My name is Aman Raina and I’m an Investment Coach and Founder of Sage Investors. I help new investors who want to be financially independent but feel intimidated and confused about the investing world. They don’t know what the right investing path is for them nor where to begin. I teach and engage them how to make educated investment decisions so that they can achieve financial freedom in their lives with confidence.

THE EVERYDAY INVESTING PROGRAM

The Everyday Investing program is a series of 8 online modules that I have developed that will teach you the core principles of buying and selling stocks. The Program will help you develop one of the core investing competencies which becoming more financially literate. The Everyday Investing program will make you more comfortable in evaluating stocks. You will learn the mechanics of investing. Mechanics though is not enough. With these mechanics we will overlay what we consider to be the secret sauce of investing; an enhancement and awareness of the behavioural aspects of investing which often become insurmountable barriers and negatively hinders our success. You’re going to learn all of this and then we will put it all together into a simple framework that will enable you to evaluate stocks more effectively.

THE PROGRAM: WHAT YOU WILL LEARN

In the Everyday Investing Program, you will learn to:

1) Understand principles on how companies create wealth and what drives stock prices. We use these principles to build on more specific investment competencies.

2) Read and interpret one of the most significant tools investors have at their disposal in evaluating stocks, the financial statements.

3) Use every-day macroeconomic measurements to better understand the business environment companies operate in.

4) Determine if a company and/or its stock is a risky investment.

5) Figure out of a stock is cheap or expensive.

6) Answer the 8 most important questions  you need to ask every time you are evaluating a stock.

7) Identify which investment products are appropriate for you.

8) Understand and be aware of the secret sauce that separates great investors from the rest, which is being more mindful of behaviours that an negatively impact our investment decisions and how to manage them better.

The Everyday Investing Program is very on-demand. You set the schedule and engage in the modules on your time and in a variety of Internet connected media (laptop, tablet, smartphone, podcast). If you’re fuzzy about a concept you can go back and review. Set aside a weekend and binge learn!

A Second Level of Learning: Join the Community

When you complete a module, the learning is by no means over. I’ve created a set of Discussion Groups for each module where participants can compare notes with each other. Confused about a concept in a module? Post a query and let the community of Sage Investors (myself included) help you and discuss.

Just think, you will finally feel that you are going in the right direction in growing your savings and truly taking control of your financial destiny!

IS INVESTING DIFFICULT TO LEARN? I’VE ALWAYS BEEN INTIMIDATED BY INVESTING. SHOULD I BE?

The financial services industry has done a masterful job in making you feel like an incompetent dweeb by throwing out jargon, terminology and bravado that make it look like you have no shred of intelligence and capability of successfully investing your money on your own and that you are better off handing your money to them.

Wrong.

What attracted me into investing and more specifically what got me more passionate about working with people to make them better investors is my strongest belief that investing at its core is fundamentally easy and can be done by anyone if they are willing to learn not just the mechanics of buying and selling stocks but just as importantly the behavioural side. I believe the investment industry has purposely made buying and selling stocks  more difficult and they have no interest in making it simpler.

Successful investing at its core is about identifying well-run, well-managed businesses that create tangible wealth for its shareholders and are selling at a discount and later selling them when they have achieved their estimated value or a personal return you are seeking for your portfolio. The Everyday Investing program will teach you how to do this and in a way that is not intimidating. The key driver of this Program is making you more aware of financial information cues and behaviours that you come into daily contact and can help you in your decision making but unfortunately quickly goes through one year and out the other.  

People often tell me that what scares them about investing are the mountain of math formulas and calculations involved. The Program was designed in a way to melt away that fear by laying a strong foundation of financial concepts in a simple easy to understand format and then layering some simple, core go-to, easy-to-understand mathematical tools that can help you process that information better. As you complete each module, you will come away with some profound concepts and practices that will be embedded with you forever because you will be grounded in basic investing principles, practices, and behaviour.

DO YOU TEACH DAY TRADING? AM I GOING TO LEARN HOW TO BE A DAY TRADER?

This is not a day trading program. If you are seeking a trading program, you won’t find it here. Best to move on.

WHAT'S YOUR TRACK RECORD? DO YOU MAKE MONEY?

I believe it's one thing to teach people how to invest. It's another thing to model the lessons and behaviours being taught and to walk the talk. One of the core elements of my practice is to be transparent in sharing my own investment decisions and the challenges that I face. It's a big reason why I tweet out in real time every investment decision (#trade2019, #trade2018, #trade2017, #trades2016) so people can see what I am doing and more importantly my thought process behind them. Every month I blog in more detail the investment decisions I make and for the decisions involving buying stocks, I incorporate the 8 questions that I teach people in the Everyday Investing program that they need to answer when they are evaluating stocks.

I very much believe in practicing what I teach. So where has that got me? Well if you go back to my last 100 investment decisions, which runs back over 8 years, 84 of those 100 decisions were profitable with an average return of approximately 13.4 percent.

I CAN GO ON THE COMPUTER AND SEARCH FOR BLOGS AND ARTICLES BY PEOPLE WHO “TEACH” INVESTING AND THEY’RE FREE. WHY WOULD I NEED TO PAY FOR SOMETHING LIKE YOUR PROGRAM?

Absolutely you can just Google “investing in stocks resources” and you can come up with hundreds and thousands of amazing investing resources. I can give you a list of resources to start out. As much as the Internet has made what was once proprietary investment research and education available to the masses, it has created a fair amount of information that even though can in some cases be “free” are often fragmented, not integrated, and frankly noisy and irrelevant. For an individual to reconcile and filter this mountain of information into a cohesive learning platform would require a ridiculous amount of time and effort. It can be done without a doubt. Most people would give up or couldn’t be bothered. Through my practice I have invested that time on your behalf and have prepared a learning program that has done a lot of the dirty work for you and like any well running business, I would expect to be compensated for that time and work effort. The fees associated with the Program are consistent for what you would pay in a University level finance or investing course and in some cases are much cheaper if you choose to take certain modules in the Program.

HOW MUCH TIME AND EFFORT DO I NEED TO PUT INTO YOUR PROGRAM AND INVESTING IN STOCKS AS A WHOLE?

The 17 hours of course materials in the Everday Investing Program took me 4 years of undergrad business school as well as another 2 years of graduate business school to learn and accumulate, so the easy answer would be you need at least 17 hours to learn how to invest in addition to practicing.

The reality is learning how to buy and sell stocks is short compared to the time required to practice.  I wrote a blog entitled: Why Investing Is Hard: We don’t practice enough where I said,

“People have a hard time with investing because they simply just don’t do it enough. We don’t commit the time to learn and practice the skill. If we’re not engaged in the process, we will not receive meaningful feedback (which is ironic because technology gives us real-time feedback on the progress of our portfolios) and we will be less likely to improve our development. When we do engage in a program with a financial advisor, often our interaction takes place at the start and maybe if we’re lucky once a year, which to me is not enough when we are talking about something so important as your personal finances. That meaningful feedback loop that can keep us engaged is few and far between.”

You need to practice this skill. If you are investing in individual stocks, you will need to commit time to understanding and evaluating companies. At first it can be quite a load, but like anything the more you practice, the better you get. I say this to every potential protégé I meet, you have to commit the time to the cause. The great thing about the Everyday Investing Program is that we have created a framework that can allow you to quickly identify the key go-to-factors of analyzing a company so that you can accurately and quickly evaluate an investment opportunity.

WHAT ARE YOUR QUALIFICATIONS?

I’ve been investing in stocks since 1996. In terms of formal training, I obtained my Bachelor of Commerce degree, with specialization in Finance and Accounting from Carleton University in Ottawa Canada. I completed the Canadian Securities Course which is one of the core certification pre-requisites required to work in the industry. I also obtained my MBA from the Ivey School of Business at the University of Western Ontario.

My passion for investing was crystallized when I got my first job working at the Toronto Stock Exchange in the time when the trading floor still existed. I was on the floor on that fateful afternoon when Bre-X traded from $10 to 50 cents within milliseconds. Working in that environment, motivated me to elevate my knowledge of investing beyond the Finance textbooks I read in university. Alas, I was disappointed to find a lack of credible and unbiased investment information available, so in the true spirit of an Outlier, I refined and practiced my known skills in programming and financial analysis to develop a database of Canadian investment research using a unique model (Economic Profit). Malcolm Gladwell would be proud.

I founded AKR Capital Research and began providing portfolio managers and individual investors with independent investment research. Over the years, I switched my focus away from institutional clients because frankly, they really don't need any help. They will make their money no matter what happens. The group that I see requiring the most assistance is the average retail investor, who after several stock market meltdowns are now empowering themselves to take control of their portfolios and investments. They are looking for someone to coach them to elevate their financial literacy so they can maneuver and synthesize the mountain of investment information to separate noise from value and leverage this information through analysis to make informed and successful investment decisions. They are not looking for PhD explanations. They are not looking to be talked down and shunned like second-class citizens by financial institutions. I personally have gained much more satisfaction helping these hard working people.

After investing for 20 years, I really believe that investing is a lot easier than what the industry makes it out to be. I believe that any person can become really good at investing if they have the right education, motivation, and support. With that I transformed my practice into Sage Investors with a goal of creating an army of empowered and successful Sage Investors!

I've seen it first hand in the people I've worked with. My first clients knew nothing about investing, but with hard work and commitment to learning the mechanics and emotional aspects of investing, I see them now as confident investors who are building a meaningful nest egg for their future on their own.

I see them happy that their hard earned savings are growing meaningfully for them.

They have hope.

They have hope that that they have a good chance of having some financial flexibility to achieve their own personal and family goals.

I have gained so much admiration in watching people making more successful investment decisions and greater satisfaction in knowing I have played a role in helping these hard working people achieve some level of financial freedom in their lives. The best part is when I help someone on their investing journey, I am learning something new about investing that helps me. What a win-win!


MY BROKER/ADVISOR HAS A VARIETY OF ONLINE COURSES THAT I CAN TAKE FOR FREE. WHY WOULD I PAY FOR A COURSE LIKE YOURS?

I’m sorry to have to break this to you that even though you may have never had to pay out of pocket for consultations or special courses,  you have actually been paying your brokerage company. You just haven’t known this because the financial services industry has buried these fees into your overall service fee. It just hasn’t been itemized.

One of key features of my coaching practice is that I don’t sell any financial products. I am not compensated by any banks, insurance or mutual fund companies. I get zero commissions, trailer fees, or bonuses. By doing so, I can offer my clients and students registered in the How To Invest in ETF course true unbiased insights and perspectives that other financial advisory services cannot provide. I am so proud to say that this freedom and independence is the essence of the Sage Investors brand.  What I get paid for is the time I spend teaching, mentoring, developing, and supporting my protégés.

HOW IS YOUR PROGRAM DIFFERENT FROM OTHER INVESTING SEMINARS? I’VE BEEN TO OTHER INVESTING SEMINARS AND THEY TURN OUT TO BE A TOTAL SALES JOB GETTING ME TO BUY OTHER BOOKS AND DVD’S.

From my experience with investment seminars, I’ve found them more of a teaser/bait and switch setup where they lure you in with promises of grandeur and show small nuggets of information to get you to buy more nuggets of information via CD/DVD etc only to be given smaller nuggets of information to get you to buy more CD and books. This is wrong. This is not learning.

I’m proud to say that none of our modules in the Everyday Investing series are teasers. You will learn something profound and important in each module. We also don’t waste time with sales schlop and niceties. We get down to business right away even in Module 1.

With the Everyday Investing Program, you have the option of registering for the entire 8 module program or registering for individual modules. We designed the program this way so you can test-drive the course as well as to allow more experienced investors who are looking to improve their knowledge in specialized areas like measuring the intrinsic value of stocks or learning about factors that can influence interest rates to register for those components individually.

The only thing we will encourage you to follow up on is…take other modules in the Program! While the Everyday Investing program enables people to pick and choose relevant modules, it was truly designed so that the learnings of each module build off the learnings of a previous module, so when you reach Module 8, you will have completed a thorough examination and review of core elements and learning principles that make up a thoughtful, successful investment decisions. To max out the training, it is ideal if students completed Modules 1-8 in its entirety. There are no mandatory prerequisites for any of the modules.

I ALREADY WORK WITH A BROKER OR FINANCIAL ADVISOR WHO MANAGES MY INVESTMENT PORTFOLIO. IS THERE ANY POINT TO TAKING A COURSE LIKE YOURS?

With knowledge comes awareness. With awareness comes an ability to be more critical when evaluating how your invest program is progressing With the Everyday Investing program you will be armed with enough financial knowledge that you can go into a meeting with your advisor and ask more pointed and direct questions in regard to the investment strategies being implemented for you. In many cases you may discover that your advisor has invested your hard earned savings in areas that you really have no business being in. You can filter out investment opportunities that you are presented much better. You will be able to speak the language better so you can better process and understand information that the advisor is presenting you. With awareness comes confidence, and when you project confidence to your advisor they will realize they will have to work much harder to keep your business! Conversely if you are seeking a financial advisor, you will be able to better evaluate their financial literacy and competency. The agenda will come back to focus on what is truly important….you!

WHY ARE YOU TEACHING THIS? IF I KNEW HOW TO MAKE MONEY, I’D BE LOUNGING ON THE BEACH?

Lounging on a beach is a definite option, however, I take a great deal of pride and satisfaction when I can help someone become better at doing something. As it pertains to investing, for me there is no greater feeling than seeing someone who did not know much about investing and were intimidated by the whole prospect of it commit themselves to learning and refine their behaviors to over time to become successful at it. They say to teach is to learn twice and every time I teach a module I personally seem to learn something new myself from my students!

I'M REALLY SKEPTICAL OF ONLINE PAYMENTS. IS THERE ANOTHER WAY YOU CAN ACCEPT PAYMENT WITHOUT GOING THROUGH YOUR WEBSITE?

Please contact us and we can arrange for another payment method.

IF I DON'T LIKE YOUR COURSES. CAN I WITHDRAW?

Full refund available up to 5 days after purchase and account setup.

RESULTS: AN EDUCATED, ENGAGED, EMPOWERED INVESTOR...YOU!

I believe the Everyday Investing Series is one of the best investment decisions you can make as at the end you will have learned and will be ready to take action immediately on making successful investment decisions. You will feel  confident about making investment decisions and more importantly I know the fear factor that many people have about investing will melt away pretty fast. I invite you to register and I look forward to beginning the journey with you to unleash your inner Sage Investor!

To your future investing success!