“I’m Victor McClure. I’ve spent over 20 years helping people just like you make sense of their investment options. It doesn’t have to be as complicated as people make it out to be. If you just apply a few common sense principles, you can easily distinguish great investment strategies from poor ones. But judging from a lot of the nonsense that passes for investment advice today, ‘common sense’ isn’t really all that common.

“The most frequent problem I see is that people let their emotions cloud their math. I know money is an emotional topic. But your emotions – and your long-term goals – are unique to you. Math, on the other hand, either works or it doesn't.

“Here's how I see it. Whatever your goals are, you want your investments to achieve the highest long-term results possible – to give you the best chance of reaching your goals. (I’ve never met anyone whose goals would be easier to reach with less money, not more. Have you?) Every investor has at least that much in common.

“But your goals – and your emotions – have nothing to do with an investment's long-term performance. A given investment vehicle is not going to perform any better than it would otherwise just because you (or the press, or your next-door neighbor) are excited about it. Wishing doesn’t make it so.

“So if you look carefully at a certain investment, do your homework, and decide that the math works, then it might be a good option for you. If the math doesn’t work, you shouldn’t give it a second thought – or a place in your portfolio.”

Member: FINRA and SIPC