Celebrating the Freedom We Own

In this coronavirus-clouded year, freedom felt somewhat ephemeral.

The COVID-19 pandemic cloud kept us at home, masked up, social distanced and for much of the year, locked down. Indeed, where I live in Southern California, things now are back to full lockdown mode. No indoor or outdoor dining, no gym visits, no Rose Parade and most certainly no big New Year’s Eve celebratory bashes (at least not in my world).
Yet rather than bemoan the negative, my optimistic eyes allow me to see the beauty and the freedom of this most-wonderful world. For example, take a look at the beauty of the message from Cuban singer/songwriter Carlos Varela from his brilliant protest song, “Walls and Doors.”

That’s how it’s always been
And I know you know it
There can be freedom only when nobody owns it…

Now, a big part of the freedom that we own is the freedom we all have to make our own decisions about what we do with our money. And those good decisions permit us to achieve another very important aspect of freedom — the financial freedom to live the lives we desire.

This latter freedom is ultimately what this service, and all of my advisory services, are about. It’s the freedom to choose the best investment vehicles available to us in order to achieve our objectives.

That objective might be to concentrate on long-term, income-focused investing via owning a basket of the best dividend-paying stocks the market has to offer the way we do in this service.

Or, that objective might be to grow our money during bull markets and get out of the market and into safety during bear markets (the signature trend-following system in my Successful Investing service). Our objective also might be to make more aggressive short-term trades that take advantage of smaller, more secular trends by also using options (Fast Money Alert, Bullseye Stock Trader).

Yet regardless of our objectives, the real power and beauty here is that we have the freedom to tailor our decisions to meet those goals.

I am both honored and privileged by your decision to allow me and my team to help steer that freedom, and today I want to humbly thank you on behalf of myself and my team for the trust you place in us each week.

And though we won’t be perfect all of the time with our decisions, you can trust that our decisions will always be perfectly thought through, and as precisely and thoughtfully reasoned and researched as humanly possible. That is the promise to you that I have fulfilled in this crazy pandemic year, and it is the same promise I make to you today for the year to come — and well beyond.

So, here’s to another great year, and here’s to reveling in our freedom for another trip around the Sun.