When it comes to investing, you have two real choices: do you want to be sexy or do you want to be rich? You may be asking yourself what does being sexy have to do with investing? A lot actually. Read on for an explanation.

sexy or rich - investing

Being Sexy

The investment industry promotes being sexy when it comes to investing. They talk about hot new funds and stocks and day trading. These are the things on the magazine covers and are the stories on the 24 hour business channels. Why do they promote these things? Because sex sells.

They make these investments look hot and fun and make investors think that they too can make a good amount of money by investing in these funds and or stocks and using these techniques. But what they don’t tell you is that this is how they will make their money.

All of the trading that you will be doing incurs fees and commissions, which lines the investment firms pockets. You are paying for what they are selling. Unfortunately, the returns you get won’t be a “hot” as they promise for the most part.

Being Rich

Ironically, the best chance you have to be successful when investing is to do the complete opposite of what Wall Street is telling you or selling you. The less you trade and the more you focus on low cost investments that you hold for the long term, the greater the chances of investment success and therefore, being rich.

But this type of investing isn’t sexy. The Wall Street firms don’t make much money on those that buy and hold for the long-term. As a result, they can’t really promote it. After all, how many times can you tell people to buy and hold on the 24 hour business channel? After about 30 minutes, it is going to get old. Then what will they talk about?

The same idea applies for all of the business magazines. There are only so many ways you can talk about buy and hold investing. They need to come up with investment stories 12 times a year, year after year. I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t want to read about buy and hold investing 12 times a years.

Final Thoughts

Continuous buying and selling isn’t the way to investment riches. A long-term buy and hold approach is. You always hear about the sexy investments however because those are how the investment firms make money. They have to promote their products and sell them otherwise they go out of business.

Be smart when it comes to your investing. Listen to successful investors like Warren Buffett who have a proven track record and not a random “expert” at a party telling you his hot stock is going to allow him to retire early. Chances are it won’t.

Create an investment plan for your goals and lifestyle and then follow that plan for the long-term, regardless of what the market it doing. This is the only way for long-term investing success.

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