Just Invest!

Talking Real Money - Investing Talk

Don McDonald

Education, Investing, Business, How To

4.5 • 811 Ratings

🗓️ 4 August 2025

⏱️ 32 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this episode, Don and Tom tackle investor emotion during market highs and use a Schwab-inspired scenario to show how discipline beats market timing—every time. They walk through four fictional investors (lucky, disciplined, unlucky, and fearful) to reveal the long-term value of staying invested. The hosts also answer a listener’s question about breaking into the fiduciary advice world and finish with a blistering takedown of FIBA, a so-called fiduciary group pushing high-commission annuities to federal workers. This one’s part reality check, part rally cry. 0:04 Emotional investing and the danger of reacting to market highs 1:13 Why timing the market is so tempting—and so wrong 2:35 Four investor scenarios: lucky, disciplined, unlucky, and the guy who sat it out 5:03 20-year returns: how even the worst timing beat sitting in T-bills 6:25 Discipline as a risk-reduction strategy and emotional filter 8:16 Worst-case fear vs real-world data: even the unlucky come out ahead 9:21 Market rebounds: faster than most think, from 2008 to 2025 10:28 The fourth golden rule: Discipline beats market noise 13:03 Listener Zach thanks Tom—phone call advice pays off 13:34 Listener “Long” asks how to become a fiduciary advisor 14:55 Why financial skills alone don’t make great advisors 16:38 Should you start at a sales-driven firm? Probably not 18:04 Better idea: get your Series 65, find a DFA firm, study for CFP 20:08 Sales skills matter—but you don’t have to sell your soul 20:55 Listener asks about FIBA and a “too good to be true” annuity pitch 21:48 FIBA’s fake fiduciary claim and questionable annuity advice 24:30 Unregistered “advisors” pushing 9–11% commission products 26:25 Why these products are sold: $35K+ commissions 28:30 How to spot fake fiduciaries—and what real ones disclose 29:23 Tom and Don still steaming about annuity predators Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Reality Radio for a really great future.
0:07.9	We're talking real money.
0:10.2	It's talking real money time.
0:13.1	Hi, I'm Don McDonald.
0:14.3	Tom Cox over there.
0:15.7	We're here to help you do something important.
0:20.2	Manage your money better. And we're here to stop you from something important. Manage money better.
0:22.0	And we're here to stop you from doing something really dangerous.
0:26.4	Getting caught up in the emotions of it all.
0:30.6	Really, that is the biggest purpose we serve is to maintain your emotional stability because we get a little crazy. And we get a little
0:41.1	crazy in times of what are perceived to be extremes. And lately, we've been going through periods of
0:47.3	the dreaded all-time high, high, high, high, highs. You know, the market hit all-time highs. And when we hear the market
0:58.1	hits all-time highs, we think, I better wait to invest. Should I wait? Yeah, I think I'll wait until
1:06.9	the market's more affordable. But that's called timing the market. And I think we've
1:15.1	shown you that it doesn't work. But today we're going to try and illustrate it even more
1:19.5	simply than we have in the past. Yeah, it's a fascinating thing that we believe, we all believe, that recency bias is an issue, but we also think we can see the future in some way based on where things are today.
1:35.6	And I think you said this well at retire meet one year when somebody asked a question and they said, this is got a do, do, no, no, no, and he said, we don't know what's going to happen one second from now, five seconds. No idea. But people do have this belief. They do have a tendency, as you said, to think, well, markets are an all-time high, it should wait. Or, conversely, we got all these new tariffs. The future is horrible. Got to get out. That turned out to be a bad
2:01.4	decision. I mean, it's one or the other. But Schwab did this. I think this is valuable because the
2:07.6	work is not just an aggregate number. No, it's actual experiences. Yeah, it's fascinating. It's simple and
2:13.8	it's personalized. Now, the problem is it's two years old. So this data is not up to date,
2:22.0	but I love this scenario. Let's just look at it even more simply than they did it in their article.
2:26.9	Let's look at it as four different investors. Okay, we have the world's luckiest investor, and she, 20 years ago, put $2,000 in the market at the exact lowest price day in the year and managed to do the same thing every year purchased perfect
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