Company Philosophy

And now, on with our formal, buttoned-down introductory essay, which begins by asking you …

Are You Better-off Than You Were 10 Years Ago?

The Institute Of Higher Earning may be one the most unique financial education and services groups anywhere. In fact, we do so many different things that visitors to our website often don’t know where to begin. So let’s begin right here, with a little financial ‘tough love.’

Does the current economy scare you? Are you in debt up to your eyeballs? Does your daily survival plan consist of holding a series of underpaying and under-appreciated jobs in a declining economy? Is retirement looking like something you’ll only get to do the day you die? Do you wish you could ditch the 9-to-5 world and make a living from home, over the Internet? Then you need to ‘create your own economy’, to create a financial moat around your life that profits from whatever the economy dishes out.

Think of it this way. Markets go up, and markets go down. When the market goes up, everyone’s a genius and everyone’s making money. When the market heads down, everyone’s anxious, depressed or panicky. But why? A declining market is not an emotional experience. It’s a market that’s trending down. Maybe it’s enjoying itself! After all, you like skiing and sledding down hill, don’t you? See, it’s all in your perspective.

Is your retirement nest egg vaporizing as the stock market crashes? Why? This isn’t rocket science. There’s simply no excuse for it. When the market starts to head down, you invest with low risk in inverse exchange traded funds (ETFs) and mutual funds that profit from a falling market.

Do You Rely on a Financial Advisor?

Did you know that most investors who rely on a financial planner have already lost a lot of money in the current recession? Financial planners tell their clients, ‘This is a pretty tough market to make money in, but the market will always recover. Besides, we’re only down 20% and most investors are down 30%, so we’re doing pretty well!’

Hogwash! When a market is trending down, you trade it DOWN of profit. Our ‘ETF Wave Trader’ service generated a fortune for our subscribers when the U.S. stock market began to collapse on June 11, 2008. Advisors who have watched their client’s portfolios collapse along with the market should be tarred and feathered. Maybe you should be your own financial planner?

The problem is, investing intimidates you, right? But why should it? It’s easy. If you can balance a checkbook or set an alarm clock, you can learn how to invest profitably. A bright teenager can do it! It’s basic pattern recognition combined with 6th grade math (4th if you were home-schooled.) Picture a wavy line. It’s a graph of the stock market. The graph curves up and the graph curves down. Up, down, up, down, over and over again. As I said, it’s not an emotional experience. It’s actually quite beautiful! Like watching a dolphin swim. First it breaches, then it dives – do you get the picture?

When the stock market curves up, you buy stocks. When it flattens out you sell your stocks and take profits. At that point you can do two things. Wait – maybe for years, for the market to trend up again, in which case your retirement planning stands still in the meantime. Or invest in stocks and mutual funds that profit from a falling market so you can make money on the way down.

When the market stops falling and bottoms out, you get out and take profits again. This is called ‘riding the wave’ – the dolphin would understand. But for most investors these days, it’s called ‘riding the Titanic!’

A: Of course, you’d think he was out of his mind!

A: Just fill in the blanks.

We talk to people all the time who don’t even know how their 401(k) is doing. Can you imagine that? Don’t they care about their financial future? Or do they just go to work just for the fun of it? Why do they spend more time micro-managing every minute of their next vacation, but can’t answer a straight question like ‘By what percent has your retirement portfolio risen or dropped over the last year?’ Or, ‘exactly which mutual funds does your financial advisor have you in, anyway?’ They don’t know! Their financial future is under water and they don’t have a clue.

Changing the subject slightly, are you in debt yet have enough income to cover your bills? So why aren’t you using an aggressive debt roll-down program to vaporize your unpaid bills, saving a bundle in finance charges and then creating a retirement fortune out of the same money you’re feeding to bankers? Again, this isn’t rocket science. It’s basic mathematics. It’s called the exponential function. It’s called the ‘Bankers Secret’ and it’s being used against you, quite aggressively, by the loan and credit card companies. Wouldn’t it be fun to use this technique against them for a change? To make yourself rich instead?

What about commuting to a job you hate? Did you ever stop to consider that, by very definition of the term employee, you keep selling your time for the very least someone else is willing to pay you? How does that make you feel? About the same as being in all that debt? Or watching your ‘financially planned’ retirement dropping like a rock? No fun, is it?

So when are you going to hide that TV remote (or better still, shoot the TV and bury it), buckle down, start educating yourself and taking personal responsibility for your financial future? Don’t depend on Congress to bail you out. The U.S. government is so deep in debt that Uncle Sam needs hip waders just to man the printing press. Social Security? Medicare? David Walker, the recent Comptroller General – the government’s former top accountant quit his job because no one in the government was listening to him. He says there’s an ‘economic tsunami’ (those are his words, not mine) building on the horizon that could make the Great Depression of the 1930’s look like a mere pothole.

The way we see it, you’ve basically got two choices. Continue to be an underpaid, wage-earning gerbil, who gets creamed by inflation, a deflating economy and ends up living with two or three other families in a run down rental, using what’s left of Social Security to cover whatever part of ‘health care’ that isn’t covered by Medicare. Or you can become strong, astute, informed, secure and independent, relying on yourself to steer your financial ship past the reefs and into a sunny harbor where you can drop your golden anchor and spend your time in a hammock, watching the economy collapse on TV!

We Deconstruct Conventional Financial Plans

As you may have gathered by now, we are not financial planners. We are ‘financial un-planners.’ We cannot get licensed to give you unconventional, contrarian personal financial advice. Leave it to your financial advisor to dispense mainstream guidance. Need a new advisor? Check the Yellow Pages for the second largest ad – they try harder.

What we CAN do is to teach you the secrets about rapid debt roll-down, about highly profitable, low-risk investing, trading strategies that you probably never knew existed, and generally provide you with a ‘10,000 foot view’ of money.

They’re not really secrets, but they might as well be judging by how few people use them.

We can teach you how to turn your entire financial apple cart around. We’ve got the education, the programs, the services and the coaching. We can’t think for you, but we can help you start thinking for yourself. We can educate you, motivate you, even nag you when necessary. We can teach you how to trade and invest right over the Internet in the stock and Forex currency markets. We can teach you why, when and how to invest in currencies, stocks, oil, gold, silver and commodities, as well as when to trade those markets down. We can even show you the very day you’ll be debt free, using the same income you already have. This is such a neat mathematical trick, not to mention a total no-brainer, that if you don’t know how to do it, you could easily end up broke.

Assuming certain factors such as potential rates of return and how many years you’ve got left to before retirement, we can also show you how large a pile of money you could reasonably expect to have the day you decide to abandon the commute for a rocking chair or a deep water kayak. The information we offer isn’t free, but it is reasonably priced. As you may have surmised, we’re definitely not ‘in the box.’ We can’t even find the box anymore. The bottom line is, we’re not for everyone but we may be right for you.

About the Founder

Gordon Philips

Director of Trading & Research, Institute of Higher Earning

Gordon Philips is an irrepressible sexagenarian who married a woman twenty years younger, began having children at the age of 53 and typically exhausts everyone around him. His wife, Marlena, says he has two speeds: on and off.

As a boy he learned to use a slide rule from his father, a successful New England businessman and international textile engineer, and still prefers a ’slip stick’ to a calculator to this day. The ultimate opportunist, he applied a lifetime interest in math and physics while an undergrad at Boston University’s premed program.

There he devised fiendish techniques to forecast trends in the U.S. stock market, emerging markets, foreign currencies, precious metals, the oil sector and commodities.

His motto: “Never put off until today what you can do yesterday.”

Gordon Phillips was born when Truman was still in the White House and knows a wooden nickel when he sees one. A recipient of the Daughters of the American Revolution award in an era when people could still spell ‘Constitution,’ Gordon is a diehard New Englander who believes in the slogan on his state license plate which reads ‘Live Free Or Die’, and wouldn’t be caught dead wearing thermal underwear.

Educated as a young pup at Phillips Andover Academy where he breathed some of the same rarified air exhaled by upper classman Gee Dubya Bush, Gordon matriculated to Boston University as a pre-med student where he feverishly burnt the midnight oil studying physics, organic chemistry… and the bass guitar.

After years spent in professional dissipation as a jazz musician, Gordon proceeded directly to retirement at the age of 30 before he was too old, too sick, too broke, or too depressed to enjoy it.

Sensing 10 years later that it was time to decide what he wanted to be when he grew up, Gordon awarded himself a Doctoral Degree (with Minimum Laude) from The School of Hard Knocks, then immediately immersed himself in the study of finance, econometrics and global macroeconomics, none of which, he soon realized, will ever make you a dime.

After reading every investment book he could get his hands on while downing black coffee at a local Barnes & Noble bookstore (before being banned for loitering), Gordon began trading stocks and promptly lost his shirt. Then he traded options. Then baseball cards. Then back to stocks. Then he discovered Forex and, to quote Robert Frost, ‘that has made all the difference.’

In 2000, along with his wife Marlena, Gordon co-founded The Institute Of Higher Earning where in addition to performing custodial duties for his dear wife he develops programs and mechanical strategies to eliminate debt, trade the stock market up and down (for a nice penny in both directions) and trade the Forex currency market for the big pips, while providing FREE trading and investing support that is worth twice the price and otherwise helping working stiffs everywhere figure out what Rumplestiltsken was trying to explain to that farmer’s daughter.

He now divides his time between day trading, home schooling his children whom he fears may be smarter than he is, gleefully tuning in to far away big city traffic reports from his home office (…about a 30 foot commute from the basement shooting range), preparing for the final collapse of the dollar, issuing daily Forex and stock forecasts for subscribers and generally staying out of trouble until the Revolution.

When he reaches 70 he intends to grow his hair like Albert Einstein, officially declare old age (since cranky septagenarians get to do pretty much anything they want), and apply himself to the founding of a true Americanist home-school university, the likes of which James Madison studied at under John Witherspoon.

In the meantime, he advises everyone to buy gold – and learn to speak Chinese.

Videos

Here you can find videos made by IOHE founder, Gordon Philips.