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I want to emphasize the importance of women being involved in investment decisions.

Every day that is not a market holiday, when the market opens at 9:30 AM, Rosi and I sell (only sell and never buy) covered calls or cash-secured puts on SPY in our portfolios. On November 11, we earned $116.27 US per contract.

Given the number of board lots of SPY in our portfolios, we can live comfortably on the income.

Here is what we did on November 11. It took about five minutes.

Chrystia Freeland is Canada’s minister of finance, which also is the equivalent of the United States vice president. Below, you can see the letter I wrote to her recently. Her response was positive, and hopefully, Canadian investors will be allowed to write cash-covered puts in their tax-advantaged portfolios as Americans can.

You can see my letter below.

Call me if you want to discuss this. (705-441-4566)

I hate weekends. On weekends, I am a miserable old man.

For retired people, every day is a weekend. I hate Saturdays and Sundays, the weekend for working people, because I can’t make any money in the stock market.

Rosi and I make money in the stock market every day which is not a holiday. We make more than I did when I was practising dentistry.

In less than 10 minutes! Before breakfast!

Here is how we do it.

I want to emphasize the importance of women being involved in investment decisions.

Every day that is not a market holiday, when the market opens at 9:30 AM, Rosi and I sell (only sell and never buy) covered calls or cash-secured puts on SPY in our portfolios. On November 7, we earned $137.46 US per contract.

Given the number of board lots of SPY in our portfolios, we can live comfortably on the income.

Here is what we did on November 7. It took about five minutes.

I intentionally mention “Rosi and I” in the title of this post. Why? Women commonly outlive their husbands, who usually handle their money management.

The inability to invest can add significant pain to the emotional trauma of the death of a spouse. Investment decisions like the one I describe below should involve both spouses.

Rosi and I sell (sell, never buy) covered calls or cash-secured puts on SPY, as you see below. We do it at 9:30 AM every day that the New York stock change is open. This method of investing has earned 16% annually for over 100 years.

It takes about five minutes.

Here is how.

Daily, Monday through Friday, Rosi snd I and live on income earned from selling covered calls and cash-covered puts. Doing so on a daily basis became possible only recently. Monday through Friday, in less than 10 minutes,  we carry out the necessary steps from anywhere on the planet where we can get an internet connection.

The only way to do better than that is to do something illegal.

Here are the steps.

I went to the local Walmart to return a defective device for credit. Walmart is very good at accepting returns for various reasons. However, they would only accept mine if I had a receipt to prove that I had bought the defective item at Walmart. I did not have the related receipt.

My mistake. What did I learn from this mistake, this practice shot? Keep receipts until you are sure you want to keep the item you bought.

Every investor has made investment mistakes, such as buying a security that declined or even went bankrupt.

Think of Enron, Nortel, Pennsylvania Central Railroad, and many others.

What about market timing, such as buying an IPO (Initial Public Offering)? The people launching an IPO know much more about the company than the buyers. Why are they selling? Why are they cashing in their chips?

Think about that.

Three years after an IPO, the average historical return is a negative 18.7%, with almost no positive returns. Almost none!

How can investors protect themselves from poor security selection? From poor market timing?

Here is how.

Recently, one of our American members asked whether all my money except emergency money is in SPY so that I can sell options on most of my savings.

He has been selling daily options on half of his savings and doing quite well.

He keeps the other half in a 401k and will use the 50/50  approach until he retires, which will be quite soon.

My response follows.

There are many government programs designed to help older Canadians stay financially independent. For example, Canadians don’t have health care issues. Retevmo costs $32,000 a month in the US.  Canadians pay a $12 dispensing fee.

So Canadians can depart from a 50/50 (or 60/40 or 45/55) or a similar asset allocation.

To make that possible, Canadians pay more in various taxes than Americans.

1. Saying “I’ll be greedy when others are fearful” is much easier than actually doing it.

2. The gulf between a great company and a great investment can be extraordinary.

3. Markets go through at least one big pullback every year, and one massive one every decade. Get used to it. It’s just what they do.

4. There is virtually no accountability in the financial pundit arena. People who have been wrong about everything for years still draw crowds.

5. As Erik Falkenstein says: “In expert tennis, 80% of the points are won, while in amateur tennis, 80% are lost. The same is true for wrestling, chess, and investing: Beginners should focus on avoiding mistakes, experts on making great moves.”

“If you’re not willing to react with equanimity to a market price decline of 50% two or three times a century, you’re not fit to be a common shareholder and you deserve the mediocre result you’re going to get.” Munger, 2012

6. There are tens of thousands of professional money managers. Statistically, a handful of them have been successful by pure chance. Which ones? I don’t know, but I bet a few are famous.

7. On that note, some investors who we call “legendary” have barely, if at all, beaten an index fund over their careers. On Wall Street, big wealth isn’t indicative of big returns.

8. During recessions, elections, and Federal Reserve policy meetings, people become unshakably certain about things they know nothing about.

9. The more comfortable an investment feels, the more likely you are to be slaughtered.

10. Time-saving tip: Instead of trading penny stocks, just light your money on fire. Same for leveraged ETFs.

11. Not a single person in the world knows what the market will do in the short run. End of story.

12. The analyst who talks about his mistakes is the guy you want to listen to. Avoid the guy who doesn’t — his are much bigger.

13. You don’t understand a big bank’s balance sheet. The people running the place and their accountants don’t, either.

14. There will be seven to 10 recessions over the next 50 years. Don’t act surprised when they come.

15. Thirty years ago, there was one hour of market TV per day. Today there’s upwards of 18 hours. What changed isn’t the volume of news, but the volume of drivel.

16. Warren Buffett’s best returns were achieved when markets were much less competitive. It’s doubtful anyone will ever match his 50-year record.

The more someone is on TV, the less likely his or her predictions are to come true. (U.C. Berkeley psychologist Phil Tetlock has data on this).

19. Related: Trust no one who is on CNBC more than twice a week.

20. The market doesn’t care how much you paid for a stock. Or your house. Or what you think is a “fair” price.

21. The majority of market news is not only useless, but also harmful to your financial health.

22. Professional investors have better information and faster computers than you do. You will never beat them short-term trading. Don’t even try.

23. How much experience a money manager has doesn’t tell you much. You can underperform the market for an entire career. And many have.

24. The decline of trading costs is one of the worst things to happen to investors, as it made frequent trading possible. High transaction costs used to cause people to think hard before they acted.

25. Professional investing is one of the hardest careers to succeed at, but it has low barriers to entry and requires no credentials. That creates legions of “experts” who have no idea what they are doing. People forget this because it doesn’t apply to many other fields.

26. Most IPOs will burn you. People with more information than you have want to sell. Think about that.

27. When someone mentions charts, moving averages, head-and-shoulders patterns, or resistance levels, walk away.

28. The phrase “double-dip recession” was mentioned 10.8 million times in 2010 and 2011, according to Google. It never came. There were virtually no mentions of “financial collapse” in 2006 and 2007. It did come.

29. The real interest rate on 20-year Treasuries is negative, and investors are plowing money into them. Fear can be a much stronger force than arithmetic.

30. The book Where Are the Customers’ Yachts? was written in 1940, and most still haven’t figured out that financial advisors don’t have their best interest at heart.

31. The low-cost index fund is one of the most useful financial inventions in history. Boring but beautiful.

32. The best investors in the world have more of an edge in psychology than in finance.

33. What markets do day to day is overwhelmingly driven by random chance. Ascribing explanations to short-term moves is like trying to explain lottery numbers.

34. For most, finding ways to save more money is more important than finding great investments.

35. If you have credit card debt and are thinking about investing in anything, stop. You will never beat 30% annual interest.

36. A large portion of share buybacks are just offsetting shares issued to management as compensation. Managers still tout the buybacks as “returning money to shareholders.”

37. The odds that at least one well-known company is insolvent and hiding behind fraudulent accounting are high.

38. Twenty years from now the S&P 500 (SNPINDEX:^GSPC) will look nothing like it does today. Companies die and new ones emerge.

39. Twelve years ago General Motors (NYSE:GM) was on top of the world and Apple(NASDAQ:AAPL) was laughed at. A similar shift will occur over the next decade, but no one knows to what companies.

40. Most would be better off if they stopped obsessing about Congress, the Federal Reserve, and the president and focused on their own financial mismanagement.

41. For many, a house is a large liability masquerading as a safe asset.

42. The president has much less influence over the economy than people think.

43. However much money you think you’ll need for retirement, double it. Now you’re closer to reality.

44. The next recession is never like the last one.

45. Remember what Buffett says about progress: “First come the innovators, then come the imitators, then come the idiots.”

46. And what Mark Twain says about truth: “A lie can travel halfway around the world while truth is putting on its shoes.”

47. And what Marty Whitman says about information: “Rarely do more than three or four variables really count. Everything else is noise.”

48. The bigger a merger is, the higher the odds it will be a flop. CEOs love empire-building by overpaying for companies.

49. Investments that offer little upside and big downside outnumber those with the opposite characteristics at least 10-to-1.

50. The most boring companies — toothpaste, food, bolts — can make some of the best long-term investments. The most innovative, some of the worst.

We need advisers for a long list of issues. For example, life insurance, estate planning, retirement planning, debt reduction, record keeping, employee benefits, mortgages, annuities, incorporation, trusts, tax planning, human resource retention, preparing business plan, marketing, branding, social media, hiring, negotiating with landlords, negotiating with suppliers, individual investment plans, registered education savings plans, wills, etc., etc., etc.

But for money management, that is, for investing, to quote David Swensen