About Us – Impossible Portfolio

What We Do

Members support our work and drive the research topics. In return, they access proprietary tools and techniques we devise, and profit from effective, professional strategies made easy.

When the Financial Crisis unfolded in late-2007, we responded to our members’ need to protect their investment accounts by creating robust portfolios and risk management protocols. Believe it or not, this assignment was actually more challenging than trading.

We anticipate the year 2020 to be one that will be remembered, not just for the human toll of Covid-19, but for the economic one as well. Not since World War II have developed nations responded to a global crisis by taking such extraordinary fiscal and monetary actions. With debt levels and interest rates at historical extremes, the question becomes, “What is the endgame, and are we ready for it?”

Invest with Teresa

When income exceeds expenses, it’s time to invest. The goal is to preserve the purchasing power of your savings and compound it over time. It is not trading. It is not stock picking. It is not about making transactions solely to take advantage of day-to-day fluctuations in price.

Investing takes very little time. Do it yourself. Pay yourself the fee because even a small one has a large long-term impact. Future-proof your investment plan. Avoid target date funds and the 60/40 stock/bond portfolios. They were built on theories from the 1950s and 60s when interest rates above zero were still a thing and government debt piles were going down. Those days are over.

Managing your own money is not that complicated. Follow the plan and then do it with just a few mouse clicks. As individual investors, we are so small that our actions don’t disturb markets, and that makes it easy for us to create and maintain an optimal investment portfolio. Fund managers and robo-advisors are simply too big to adapt, and because they know their competitors can’t do it either, all of them focus on lowering client expectations of future performance.

Goals don’t achieve themselves. We must make it so.

Our Story

A long time ago, in a bull market far, far, away, our original site took off in early 1999 when CNBC Power Lunch anchor Bill Griffeth selected IntelligentSpeculator.com as the site of the day.

It all started the year before when Teresa became the host of a free chat room at her new website about stock trading. Pete was one of the first people to arrive. Because we both worked in the investment industry, we did our best to educate people about risk, to remind them that the stock market is an unforgiving Darwinian mechanism that transfers hot money to the smart money. In the long run, most people lose.

The venture was not conceived as a means to make money, but as a way to connect traders from around the world. Mutual funds were hot then. The Dot-com Bubble was inflating fast. It was a time when people dreamed of quitting their jobs to trade, attracted to it by the promise of instant riches.

Our Approach

The best problems, like the best toys, are hard to exhaust. You can approach them from a variety of different angles, each new angle making the problem fresh again, and bringing the opportunity to discover something new. Any idea, no matter how crazy seeming, might work and can be worth exploring. Indeed, the harder the problem, the more degrees of freedom one can allow in tackling it. Fischer relished hard problems because he relished that freedom, but in practice he did not try just anything. In his view, if a problem does not yield to known methods, that doesn’t mean we need more sophisticated methods, indeed probably just the opposite. Usually problems are hard not because our technique is deficient but because our understanding is deficient.

~Mehrling, Perry. Fischer Black and the Revolutionary Idea of Finance

Why We Do It

On one hand, it was Steve Jobs who told the Stanford class of 2005 that “the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking.”

On the other hand, a lot of college grads have to take whatever job comes their way. During bull markets, investment firms hire big time, and that’s how I got in. Toiling in large firms gave me a deep understanding about how the industry worked and what made investors tick.

The rise of computing gave everyone access to analytics and made transactions go faster. Information became ubiquitous, but the way people made decisions changed very little. Technical analysis and investing are great examples. Elvis was 17 years old when “modern portfolio theory” was introduced. Almost every technical indicator in use today was created in the 1970s when they had to be simple enough to be calculated by hand.

Because institutional investors dominate the market with trillions of dollars under management, decisions made by committee reflect human nature, is resistant to change and adverse to taking responsibility. Individual investors like us actually benefit from our small size and flexibility. We can profit from insight, ideas and innovations made by a resourceful few.

The jury is still out as to whether I love or hate the markets, but as it turned out, I am pretty good at this type of work, so I’ll keep going.

~ Teresa