Some of you may already know Robert Hsu, whose book on investing in China came out earlier this year.  You can read a review of it that I wrote - just click on the “books” link in the top right and then check out my post on the books I’ve read since January.

Well, Robert Hsu also runs an email-list-serve-type newsletter (it’s free) which is basically an advertisement for his real newsletter which costs upwards of $99/year (I think; if you get it on sale).  It’s touted as the best investment newsletter for China right now.  Hsu is from China and goes back there regularly.  He likes to remind us that he has “people on the ground” there who know what’s really going on.  And I believe him - I read his book in about four days flat, soaking it all up.  There’s a lot of good info in it and I recommend it to people who aren’t that familiar with China.

I receive Hsu’s newsletter in my email, but I don’t always get around to reading it lately.  Have you read it?  What’s your opinion on Hsu and his advice?

Just to give you a bit of a taste of the sort of things he writes about, I’ll quote a little bit from it here.  It includes a list of some of the stocks he’s been promoting since writing his book.  Be warned, though: he’s not a buy-and-holder - he trades in and out.  So when it says he’s gained 54% or whatever, that will be from a one-time jump.  Anyways, you can judge for yourself:

Excerpt from Robert Hsu, ChinaProfitStrategy

When you consider the U.S. economy is projected to contract next year while China is on track to grow at 8%, you don’t have to be an Einstein to know that the surge in China stocks will form the foundation for a turnaround in the U.S. stock market as many leading China stocks are traded right here on the NYSE and NASDAQ.

The bottom line is this:

In a world that’s been crippled by the U.S. financial crisis, the Fed bailout and collapsing consumer and investors confidence, the flood of capital pouring into China will not only put powerful upward pressure under the stock prices of companies that are fueling China’s new growth…but also change the face of Wall Street forever.

Which is why I’m telling my readers to expect…

20%—40% Profits
In The Next 12 Months

The Biggest Move Will Come
In The Next 15 Days

As you know, nobody rings a bell to tell you when the big buying wave will begin, but I can tell you this:

Our time-proven, momentum-based stock-picking system continues to deliver profits for our readers, not only beating the market by more than $8-to-$1 since 2005…but also thrashing the market by $7-to-$1 last year, specifically with 35% returns vs. 5% for the Dow.

Our biggest winners to date include:

CNOOC, +30%
Aluminum Corp of China, +285%
New Oriental Education, +127%
Mindray Medical, +20%
Sinopec, +58%
SPDR Gold, +27%
Apple, +118%
Las Vegas Sands, +52%
Yum Brands, +12%

Now with China’s second wave set to deliver even greater growth, even these great gains could look like a drop in the bucket.

Frankly, no other investment newsletter advisory in the world knows the China market like we do, spends as much money on research as we do or makes as much money in China as we do.

Which is why I can tell you with unmatched certainty that our research shows there’s a buying wave forming within the next 15 days.  That is also why you can invest in our recommendations with confidence that you’ll grow 20%-40% richer in the next 12 months.

This post will be the first part of a series of posts I’m going to write on one very amazing and overlooked book that happens to nicely express my own intuitions on moneyenergy which helped me form the idea for this site. The author is a psychologist, and no doubt explains psychological mechanisms much better than I can, or would even have the patience for!

Warning: This is a really dense book that is not immediately accessible. It doesn’t reach out and grab your salacious imagination of making it big or generating some easy or quick cash. You have to think and work to really follow what this book has to offer. For that reason, it might not be great public transit reading if you need a quiet space for concentration. It’s also a workbook, and full of exercises that you can do - and should do, in order to get the most out of it - but for which you’ll need a notebook and a pen. I confess, I’m fifty pages into it and have not been doing these exercises. I want to go back to do them, however. In fact, I think I had even picked this book up once before and skimmed through it in a bookstore but for some reason still wasn’t ready to buy it at that point (it probably looked too dense and not immediately rewarding). So I made the mistake that I bet others have made: you’ve probably overlooked this book, too.

There’s so much in here, in fact, that I don’t think I could review the book in one post. So I’m just going to do a series and talk about it in bits and pieces. It’s one of those books that is really probably four-books-in-one. To even say that this is a book about the psychology of money is probably a big understatement.

Something that makes this book different from usual books on personal finance or even the psychology of money (stuff like Think and Grow Rich) is the overall context in which the author is working. She draws upon theoretical physics and the tradition of Western philosophy in order to explain her own theory about how we bring money into our lives (and in fact, how we bring anything into our lives). No, it’s not a prototype of The Secret, even though it was written in 1999. It’s not fluffy or wishy-washy. It’s a book for people who like to think and who aren’t full of superficial skepticism.

One idea that Nemeth expounds is that people are conscious conduits of energy (we move energy, in the form of ideas, from the metaphysical realm into the physical realm in the form of actions taken for realizing those ideas). Because of this, whenever you do something that increases your personal power, you’re doing something that can increase your ability to manifest your ideas into physical realities. It’s obvious why and how this can include financial abundance. What is one thing that increases your personal power? Maintaining your integrity. I’ll give you a bit of an excerpt from one of her discussions of personal integrity:

Who you really are, at your core, is compelled to look at areas in which your integrity is not complete. Incompletions pull life’s energy to them. After all, it takes a lot of energy to push down even low-level anxiety or dread. This energy leak only makes it harder to get your goals and dreams with ease. As you connect with and express your genuine values, your true nature, as you become conscious of who you truly are, you can no longer remain in the dark about your self-limiting ways. It becomes almost impossible to avoid taking the actions that will transform your relationship with the energy of money…the Impetus Toward Integrity [is] a phenomenon that can help you identify and seal some of the leaks that drain money’s energy. To see how it works, take a look at the diagram below, a circle with a piece missing. You recognize it as a circle because as humans, we have a strong natural ability to see the whole, even when a part is missing.

Do you notice that your eyes keep returning to the gap in the circle? That’s another part of our wiring. Your eyes are drawn there by the tension of the incompletion… If you keep in mind that your integrity is your own wholeness, it’s easy to understand why once you see it, you also see places where it might need to be patched or filled in. Until you restore that wholeness, you remain in a state of tension…if one of your Standards of Integrity is being trustworthy, every time you don’t follow through on the promises you make to yourself and others, you’ve sprung an energy leak. Until you keep the promise, your attention…is drawn to it, no matter how much you’d like to focus on your goals and dreams (71-72).

The idea here is that in order to get ahead, we need to repair all the gaps between our own personal standards and our actions. Nemeth goes on to discuss how to set proper goals, and one of the criteria for picking and creating proper goals is to make sure that your goals meet all your standards of integrity. Otherwise you won’t and can’t possibly be successful with them. I might say more about this goal-setting in another post, because she’s got lots of gems of insight there, too. But for now, I just want to leave you with the idea that every time we maintain the standards of our own integrity, our personal power (the ability to manifest our ideas into physical reality) grows. It’s about being able to trust ourselves. If you have integrity, it means you can trust yourself. In fact, that might be one interesting way of defining personal integrity: the degree to which you can trust yourself to follow through with the guidelines of your higher (or better) self.

Suggested task: Do you owe anyone any money? Pay them back as soon as possible, or at least start an installment plan. This might apply to credit cards, too. There are many reasons not to pay off debt right away, but this might be another reason why you should. It could help repair your own money integrity and stop up one of those “moneyenergy” leaks.

I have to say that lately it feels like I’ve read everything there is for me to read as far as financial books go at this time. I’m not about to invest in real estate yet, so I don’t need to read those books (it would be a bad distraction right now anyway, when I have more important things to sort out). There are all the books on trading forex and options, too. I’m going to be learning about forex, but not quite yet. There are other financial things I have to work out first. So this basically leaves the all-generic categories of wealthbuilding, budgeting, and the stockmarket. I’ve read so many great books that I really feel I have all the information that I think I need. But I’d still like to find a great new page-turner that inspires me about fixing up my finances and rockets me sooner to wealth. So I keep browsing through the financial section anyway.

Recently I came across a gawdy-looking hardcover entitled Millionaire By Thirty: The Quickest Path to Financial Independence. I picked it up because the title was so close to Alan Corey’s bestseller A Million Bucks by 30 (read my review of this awesome book here) and I was wondering how this one would be different. This one is published this year, 2008, and written by a father and his two sons - they’re all financial planners living in Salt Lake City. Maybe they’re even your neighbour? They’re churchgoers, they tithe, the one son has married early and they’re both still in their twenties. They’re all millionaires. The oldest son is only about 28 years, I think. They look a bit older in the photo on the jacket, however.

Well, guess how they became millionaires by 30? Same way Alan Corey did. Real estate! There’s a definite pattern here.

Here are some of the highlights of the book (which I’m not done reading yet, but it’s not a slow read. You could easily finish this book in two days if you’re into it):

-it’s fresh and relatively undogmatic: “not your typical financial advice”
-strategies for using preferred debt and getting rid of your non-preferred debt
-become a homeowner as soon as possible: tells you why and shows you how
-how you can legitimately buy a home even if you don’t have a credit history
-shows how to become a landlord and rent out rooms from a second home
-shows you how to save some serious money on taxes
-why IRAs and 401(k)s aren’t really that great of a deal for you
-and more that I haven’t got to yet!

You might be thinking, “wait, isn’t this the kind of wheeling and dealing that got us into the sub-prime housing mess”? Well, to that I can just say that this book was published in 2008, so I am sure the authors were/ are well aware of the housing mess and they’ve said nothing in this book to suggest that they were a part of it or that their techniques are implicated in it or that you shouldn’t follow this sort of advice because it might lead to foreclosures. I’m sure that many people have tried to do some of these techniques and that they fell into fiscal ruin because of it. As with everything, you have to check it against your own situation and see how it could work for you. These authors are advocates of fiscal responsibility by any measure.

Which is why I should add a few “bigger picture” items regarding the context in which this book makes sense. First of all, if you’re not interested in owning a second home and/or being a landlord (having tenants in one home), then this book probably doesn’t have anything for you. They don’t have solutions as to how you can become a millionaire by investing in the stock market alone. You need to rent out rooms. (Mind you, this isn’t all their book is about, for sure!).

The best part so far is how they show you how to race ahead financially by stopping “driving with your car in neutral.”

No, it’s not about making sure you’re not paying fees like crazy on your mutual funds (although that would certainly fit here too). They show you how to not pay more tax to the government than you have to and how to properly utilize the concept of “financial drag” in order to rocket yourself ahead sooner. You might have all the wind at your back, lifting your sails, but if you don’t know how to employ “drag” and “thrust” you’re not going to get anywhere quickly or in the direction that you want.

Overall, this isn’t a paradigm-shifting, shoot-you-to-the-moon financial fix book (though it could easily be if you’re younger or haven’t read many financial books yet). But it is a very accessible resource for how to just plain start getting ahead financially. There are some new and informative concepts and ways of looking at “getting ahead” that have already been useful for me. And don’t think that the book doesn’t apply to you because you already own a home or because you’re in your forties or fifties or sixties. In fact you’re probably already in a better position for putting these ideas into practice since you DO already have one home and a good credit history, etc.

Check back in here again, because I might have more to say about this book in the next few days. I also came across another great book that I’m really looking forward to reading and telling you about - and it fits right in line with the moneyenergy philosophy. Interestingly, it’s also a book from almost ten years ago. But you know, that’s not really that old when you’re dealing with ideas and paradigm-shifting techniques. These apply in all ages and for all ages.

If you’re new here don’t forget to subscribe (it’s free, of course!) for more updates on the books I’m reading, and/or make a comment below. I’d really like to hear your opinions and thoughts. Have you read this book or the other Andrews’ books? Are you reading a similar book right now? Is there another book that I should be reading? Let me know.

Do you want to hear from current/ past landlords and those bringing in portfolio income (i.e., income from real estate properties)? Check out these blogs:

The World of Wealth
Monetary Maladies (the MoneyBlogga)
The Money Kings

(If you’re a blogger who’s also got real estate investment properties and I’ve missed you, let me know! I’d like to learn more about RE from those currently doing it; perhaps there’s a way I can get started while finishing my PhD even though I don’t have a salary (just research and teaching employment).)