A PLUME BOOK
THE 3% SIGNAL
JASON KELLY is the author of The Neatest Little Guide to Stock Market Investing, a perennial bestseller. Every Sunday morning, he delivers The Kelly Letter by e-mail, providing what many subscribers call the best read of the week. Having realized his dream of being able to live and work anywhere in the world, Jason moved to Japan in 2002, where he works from his office in the countryside about two hours from Tokyo.
After the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami, he started Socks for Japan, a volunteer organization that hand-delivered 160,000 care packages from around the world to survivors. More than 70 percent of donations came from the United States. In that moment of crisis, seeing return labels from churches, Brownie troops, neighborhood coffee shops, small-town light and power departments, Mrs. Wilsons fourth-grade class, and other mainstays of American culture filled him with pride for his country.
He keeps busy writing new books and The Kelly Letter. With his sister and business partner, Emily, he co-owns Red Frog Coffee in Longmont, Colorado. Visit his website at jasonkelly.com.
PLUME
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First published by Plume, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, 2015
Copyright 2015 by Jason Kelly
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The 3% Signal and its abbreviation 3Sig are trademarks of Jason Kelly. The signal system technique is patent pending by Jason Kelly as of February 2015.
REGISTERED TRADEMARKMARCA REGISTRADA
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Kelly, Jason. The 3% signal : the investing technique that will change your life / Jason Kelly. pages cm Includes index.
ISBN 978-0-698-14573-3
1. InvestmentsHandbooks, manuals, etc. 2. Portfolio managementHandbook, manuals, etc. I. Title. II. Title: Three percent signal.
HG4527.K437 2015
332.67'8dc23 2014039340
This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering legal, accounting, or other professional services. If you require legal advice or other expert assistance, you should seek the services of a competent professional.
While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers, Internet addresses, and other contact information at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors or for changes that occur after publication. Further, publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.
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For my mother,
on whose behalf I first studied stocks
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I m surrounded by fabulous people.
I cant imagine life without Doris Michaels, the only agent Ive ever had. I was one of her first clients, and Ill be one of her last. Its a joy to still work together after all these years, and to see her and her incomparable husband, Charlie, on every trip to New York.
My editor at Plume, Kate Napolitano, worked with me on The Neatest Little Guide to Stock Market Investing. At lunch one December day just before the fifth edition debuted, she listened to my impassioned speech about a game-changing new way for people to invest using just two index funds and what I called the 3 percent signaland here we are. She was there when it began and walked every step of the way with me.
Many researchers contributed to the body of work that helped me create the plan, but in this limited space Ill mention just three. Behavioral psychologist Daniel Kahneman showed me why stock market success eludes people, and the value of following a formula. In the formula department, Im indebted to Michael Edlesons value-averaging concept of rebalancing to a fixed performance goal. John Bogle at Vanguard has been a tireless champion of index fund investing for the past four decades, and such low-cost funds are all that the 3 percent signal needs. Thank you, gentlemen. I wish there were more like you on Wall Street.
A special thank-you to Roger Crandell, whom I first met when he subscribed to The Kelly Letter but who later became a friend and research collaborator. His expert coding provided many of the historical plan results presented in this book, and his software double-checked output from my spreadsheets. You would be amazed at the volume of data crunching necessary to present what appear to be simple conclusions. Roger made this task easier for me.
Finally, thanks to Fidelity, the Investment Company Institute, Morningstar, Standard & Poors, Vanguard, and Yahoo! Finance for supplying me with information.
A NOTE ON PERFORMANCE CALCULATIONS
H istorical stock and fund prices change over time due to splits and dividends. This book shows values adjusted through autumn 2013. If you check historical prices of the investments you see in this book, many will have changed. Rest assured that this does not affect historical performance. Something that grew 20 percent back in 2005 still did so whether calculated using prices in 2005, 2013, or a future year. In the performance calculations not shown in the text, I used unadjusted prices with dividend payments to better reflect the change in balances that investors experienced at the time. For this reason, some of the prices discussed in , The Life of the Plan, are different from those shown in adjusted price tables elsewhere in the book.
This books primary time period is the fifty calendar quarters from the beginning of 2001 to the middle of 2013. To begin the period, the closing prices from December 2000 are used for the initial buys, and I usually refer to the period as the fifty quarters from December 2000 to June 2013. This sometimes confuses people, as they wonder if the time period includes 2000. No, it just uses December 2000 closing prices as the starting point for a clean look at the period from the first quarter of 2001 through the end of the second quarter of 2013, a fifty-quarter, or 12.5-year, time frame. Except for the (where the December 2000 closing price plays a critical role in the example), price tables begin with the first quarter of 2001 to display exactly fifty prices for the time period.
Finally, the 3 percent signal plan produces trading guidance for buying and selling two funds at the same time. In real life, the trades wont happen at exactly the same time, but they can get pretty close these days due to fast order execution. I calculated past performance with all trades using the closing prices of the period in question. While real-world performance will vary based on slightly different order execution prices, it shouldnt vary by much. Follow the plan, and it will basically do for you what its shown doing here.