Emperor Investments – A Review
One of the most important factors to improving your long term personal wealth (and a core pillar of personal finance) is investing. I’ve written extensively about investing and why it is so important. Investing your hard earned money is the best way to beat inflation and actually grow your money over the long-term to improve your financial situation!
One of the best ways to invest your hard earned money is to obtain ownership in successful companies through the purchase of stock. Knowing the right stocks to purchase, and even how to invest in stocks, can be super intimidating if you don’t know much about it. That’s why I’ve written an entire book – Stock Market Investing for Newbies – and offer it free to MoneyAhoy visitors. This walks a complete beginner through how to invest in the stock market.
This is great for those who want to become a financial nerd like me, but most folks don’t have the time, interest, or energy to become investment experts!! This is where an investment advisor comes in handy :-). They can take a lot of the worry, time, and headache out of stock market investing for a hopefully small fee. Most advisors are not that interesting to talk about, but I wanted to do an in-depth review about one online advisor because they are so different than most of the others, and frankly what they offer is very exciting.
Below is my full review of Emperor Investments (www.EmperorInvests.com) – read on to find out what makes them so different from the others:
What Makes Emperor Investments Different?
If you’re reading this review, you are likely new to stock market investing. Here I’ll cover what makes Emperor so different from other advisors, and then go into specifics on why those differences are important. Emperor Investments main differentiating factors are:
- You actually own the stock – they purchase it for you!
- They employee dividend investing strategies
- They use a value investing approach
- Your portfolio is targeted towards your specific goals and requirements
- They auto-rebalance your portfolio
- Fees are low
Why is Actually Owning Stock Important?
Many investors and retirement account holders will coach new investors to purchase into ETFs or mutual funds. These are basically a collection of a whole bunch of different company stocks all packaged together. This can make investing easier for sure because you can own dozens (or hundreds) of different company’s stock by only purchasing one instrument. But, it also comes with some big potential downsides:
- Your upside can be limited. If you own a collection of hundreds of stocks, you’re basically likely to do just about average.
- There can be special rules about when you can buy and sell (mutual funds are especially restrictive).
- You can be subject to foreign taxes if some of the companies operate overseas.
- Fees to manage the ETF or mutual fund can be high, sometimes over 1.5%!
- There can be “hidden fees” when you go to sell (these seem to occur more so with mutual funds).
Those are just a few of the downsides. Needless to say, it can be a very good idea to work with an advisor such as Emperor Investments which will have you actually owning the stock.
Why Dividend Investing?
First of all, if you don’t know what a dividend is, this is an amount of money a company pays out on a periodic basis to stock owners to return money (profits) to the shareholders. Dividend investing is a method of selecting stocks to invest in which have a good history of paying dividends each and every cycle (usually quarterly, but not necessarily). Some companies have been paying a consistent dividend for 30 years straight or more!
Emperor Investments uses dividend investing as one of its key strategies to enable clients to earn an income even in a sideways or down-moving market. Dividends can also be re-invested directly into the same stock to increase the rate with which your investments will grow. Pretty cool right?!
Why Value Investing?
Owning a stock of a well performing company is good. You stand to make a good return on your investment. Owning a stock of a well performing company which you purchased at a low price is even better :-)!
This method of investing, called value investing, is the attempt to find and purchase the stock of good companies which have their stock trading at a discount to what their actual value should be. This is the type of investing employed by legendary investor Warren Buffet.
It can be very time-consuming and complicated to pick out “diamond in the rough” stocks if you are trying to do this yourself! Believe me – I’ve spent countless hours trying this myself. One would need to develop a series of very sophisticated “filters” to take the thousands of stocks available and try to pick out good companies which are trading at a discount. It can very EXTREMELY tricky and time consuming…
Emperor Investments has spent years developing sophisticated algorithms to identify these “value” stocks and purchase them for your portfolio. This is something you cannot get from just any “robo-advisor.” This is part of the “secret sauce” which helps Emperor Investments to set itself apart from others.
Sure if you have the time, you can spend a couple hours each week hunting for these “deals,” but most of us don’t have the time, energy, or knowledge to do this! That’s where Emperor Investments comes in to do the heavy lifting for you.
Why Personalized Investing is Best
Along with dividend investing and value investing, Emperor Investments tailors their complex algorithms to purchase stocks which are personalized to your goals and needs. Not all of us are built the same when it comes to investing – some of us can sleep well at night taking a large amount of risk. And others, like me, don’t like all the volatility of higher risk stocks and require something a bit more stable.
This is another item which sets Emperor Investments apart from the competition. Most robo-advisors just drop you off into one of a couple “buckets” and leave you on your own. If you are on a longer investment time frame, you typically have the ability to take a bit more risk as you can always earn it back down the road. For those that have a shorter investment horizon, it can be important to limit your risk a bit more. With Emperor Investments, they work with you to design a personalized investment plan which you will be comfortable with to help meet your investing goals and time horizon. They can determine how to create your stock portfolio in as little as 10 minutes! So what are you waiting for? Get started with Emperor Investments now!
What is Rebalancing and Why is it Important?
Another great feature that Emperor Investments provides is periodic rebalancing – they do this typically once a year if it is needed. Rebalancing your portfolio is a strategy to ensure you aren’t over-weighted in any one area. If you have 5% of your portfolio targeted for energy stocks, and this sector happens to do extremely well and grow in size to become 10% of your portfolio, Emperor Investments will sell a portion of the energy stocks to get it back “in balance” and place the rest of the money so that you get re-adjusted to your target asset allocation.
Rebalancing is a tried and true strategy to help ensure your portfolio is set to achieve your goals. It is also a great way to “lock in” profits for stocks or sectors that outperform for a while. It can also be a fantastic strategy to take advantage of sectors which may be under-performing for a while and scoop up stocks at a good price. Very many robo-advisors do NOT offer this type of service at all!
Low Fees vs. the Competition
Paying attention to the fees you pay when investing is one of the most important aspects of building your personal wealth for the long term. If you decide to “go it alone” it is not uncommon for mutual funds (or even some ETFs) to charge you 1.5% or more annually! Other advisors can often charge “2 and 20”. This means they charge you a 2% annual fee and take 20% of your annual profits! Outrageous!!!
Not with Emperor Investments – their fee is just 0.6% per year! That’s it – no other gimmicks or hidden fees. While this isn’t the cheapest you’ll ever find if you are investing all by yourself (you can get as low as ~0.1%), it is EXTREMELY low for a full service robo-advisor. You are basically giving up a half a percent in fees in exchange for a “set it and forget” type of service. Don’t let mutual funds, full service human advisors, or targeted retirement funds drain your returns by paying high fees! 0.6% is a reasonable fee to get this type of personalized service in my opinion.
Final Thoughts
Emperor Investments provides a pretty unique service for folks interested in stock market investing. Their highly tailored investment strategy has shown to perform very well vs. the standard S&P-500 rate of return. Their annual fee is reasonable, and they pride themselves on not having any hidden fees. If you don’t have the time, energy, or interest in becoming a stock market investing expert, then I highly recommend you give Emperor Investments a closer look and see what they can do for you! If you use my special link, you’ll get six months free!
Disclaimer:
Mutual Funds and Exchange Traded Funds (ETF’s) are sold by prospectus. Please consider the investment objectives, risks, charges, and expenses carefully before investing. The prospectus, which contains this and other information about the investment company, can be obtained from the Fund Company or your financial professional. Be sure to read the prospectus carefully before deciding whether to invest.
Indices are unmanaged and investors cannot invest directly in an index.
The Standard & Poor’s 500 (S&P 500) is an unmanaged group of securities considered to be representative of the stock market in general. It is a market value weighted index with each stock’s weight in the index proportionate to its market value.
