Here’s my offer to you. Let me invest your money for you in the stock market. Pay me an annual fee of 1% of the value of your money that I invest for you. In return for your payment and faith in my investment abilities, I will do worse than the stock market. Yes, I will underperform the stock market, by far most of the time. On occasion, I will do better than the market. But most of the time I will do worse, particularly after you deduct my fees and all the taxes I incur for you by buying and selling your stocks. Over time, the stock market may trounce me.

You would – you SHOULD — reject my offer. It is the rational choice. But what is happening throughout the world defies rationality. There is a massive, worldwide, understated but often polite industry called money management. A fair amount of this industry is devoted to investing other people’s (or other organizations’) money in the stock markets.

Money managers charge a lot. One recent article is titled “How a 1% Fee Could Cost Millennials $590,000 in Retirement Savings.” But money managers, as a group (with some exceptions), suck. I am choosing the word “suck” carefully, having scoured the thesaurus for the best word. OK, I’ll be polite and use the word “underperform.” Depending on what statistics you use, over time (5 years plus), 90% to 96% of stock market money managers do worse than their benchmarks. This is clear underperformance.

You can invest your money in a simple, tax efficient almost zero-fee index fund. Or you can pay a money manager and do worse. As a value-added service, money management is dubious at best. There are many reasons for this dubiousness, which we will discuss in the future.

Our mission is to show you how to beat the markets and professional money managers, by yourself, while paying virtually no fees – just by taking a few extremely simple steps. Stay tuned.