Where you are trying to go — Investment Planning: Investor's CalcStation | How you are going to get there — Portfolio Management: Investor's WorkStation | How well you have done — Modified Dietz Performance Calculator: PerfCalc | What you need to think about, know, do, have, use, forget, and avoid — Investing Principles and Perspectives: In My Opinion | Home | Contact Us | Free 30-Day Software Trials | Prices/Order

Most investment planning and proposal software programs are mindless, default designed rather than user defined, and are never anything more than databases of investment history programmed to be retrieved and presented with elaborate, just pick, print, and present, laddered windows infested with graphs, data dumps, and pie charts...

while, for example, chasing efficient frontiers and waiting for fresh historical investment data to be added to the software to generate new efficient frontiers to justify investment change so that all clients are investing in the most recent investments that have done well in the most recent past...

...to create the illusion of investment analysis, interpretations, projections, and performance probabilities and to suggest investment history will somehow just repeat itself, when, in fact, what is presented is simply what has happened in the investment past as predetermined by the limitations, the exceptions, and the assumptions of the investment planning software programmers.

Investment planning reports most often end where investing really begins:

• They typically suggest, subliminally though not legally, that there is, in fact, a connection between past investment performance and future investment results.

• They are often but a distraction from the indispensable, substantive portfolio management issues and investment selection realities. 

• They offer considerable information about form and frame but little about design and structure to give the investor an investment direction and really nothing about the motor that will drive the investor to his or her investing destination.

• They usually downplay or even ignore the more important investment issues of establishing an investment philosophy, defining the correct investment selection process, and adopting proven portfolio management disciplines.

• They are usually of little material or directional value because they are often just an "instant replay" of an investor’s financial past, merely parroting back initial questionnaire input showing the individual what he or she already knows about himself/herself. 

• They are composed of historical data and hypothetical assumptions, presented in the eye-catching wizardry of colorful pie charts, graphs, and an array of schedules are but sleight-of-hand used to generate a very generic, over-assumed, and under-planed investment plan.

The investment plan’s (un)specific course of action is to be found in the ever-present admonition: "Past performance is no guarantee of future results" — just after the recommendations were selected and made based on past investment performance!

Furthermore, at the bottom of some obscure page, there is the often added subtle, oh so subtle, warning that (because the investment planning report is so generic and because the firm does not want to assume the responsibility for making specific recommendations), "Product recommendations are not specified," and/or "For specific investment advice please consult your financial advisor."

Though past performance can be a small part of the investment selection and investing performance puzzle, an investment portfolio is not necessarily better constructed or better protected because the beta is low, the alpha high, or because an investment portfolio is on the efficient frontier: 

• There are no fundamental causal relationships between these terms and a safe and sound investment portfolio; only reflective ones.
• These terms are not a measure of the true metal of an investment portfolio.
• These concepts are merely mathematical indicators of the relative, historical performance tendencies of an individual investment or investment portfolio as the markets change.
• They are the 'glitter;' however, they do little to enlighten: 

Closing question, "Then, why do you need the report?"

Investors want specific investment advice in the first place!

Generic is found and is of value only at the drugstore.

Current and projected budget, cash flow analyses, and personal balance sheets, due diligence, investment merit, investment suitability, and thoughtfully defined, relentlessly applied, and rigidly enforced investment selection and management disciplines, rules, and procedures and portfolio design, management, and performance disciplines, rules, and procedures, and the prospects for the investing future should be the primary investment planning considerations.

Plan for today. 

Take care of today.

Depend on today’s values and the dimension of time.

The future works out because we take care of the present with a vision of the future and not because the past is used to predict the future.