"If you don't know who you are, the stock market is an expensive place to find out." -Adam Smith, The Money Game

Almost all Master-level investors have developed acute self-awareness over time. It's a skill that few are born with but anyone with an average I.Q. can learn with a moderate amount of effort.

Self-awareness means having the courage to acknowledge your weaknesses and work on overcoming them, or at least taking them into consideration when making important investment decisions.

An investor who lacks self-awareness doesn't learn from his mistakes because he is unwilling to admit to himself that he has made one. He therefore repeats the same mistakes again and again, which leads to what Adam Smith called a very expensive education.

Combat troops learn to "keep your head on a swivel" because if they don't, they wont survive very long. 

Quarterbacks learn to scan the defense quickly and look for weaknesses to exploit. Those who don't have this skill are quickly replaced.

If you want to achieve master level as an investor you need to develop situational awareness. You have to pay attention to what's happening in the market and the economy. Otherwise you'll just be the sucker at the table.

In the movie "A beautiful Mind" John Nash (played by Russell Crowe) was a math genius who figured out the keys to game theory. 

In a nutshell, game theory says that it doesn't matter what the reality is when people are competing for a prize. It only matters what you think your opponents believe the reality is. If you can figure this out, you can anticipate your opponent's next move and outsmart them.

In the realm of investing, a solid grasp of game theory will take you far. It will enable you to play 3 dimensional chess while other investors are playing checkers.

There's this thing in investing called Modern Portfolio Theory. And there's this other thing called The Efficient Market Frontier. You can relax, because we're not going to go there. These topics are too wonky and you don't need to know the details.

Instead, this course will take the most critical parts of these theories and present them to you in a way that's practical and useful, without having to spend hours talking about theoretical stuff.

This short quiz will tell you how much of the module content you have retained. The purpose is to let you know if you should review the material or move on to the next module.

The studies I've seen, and there are many, agree that the way assets are allocated in a portfolio has the largest impact on portfolio returns. That's what we will address in this lesson.

There are more than 40 recognized asset classes to choose from. That’s too many. This lesson will show you how to winnow down this list to just the ones that are relevant for what you are trying to accomplish.

We have the building blocks, and now its time to choose which ones belong in your portfolio

Once you have settled on a broad asset allocation foundation, it's time to choose among the thousands of investment vehicles that will represent each of your asset classes. That may sound like a daunting task, but you only have to do it once... right now. After that it will become a matter of making minor adjustments around the edges. 

Take this quiz and find out if you're ready to move on, or go back and review one or more of the lessons.

Now that we have our short list of asset classes it’s time to drill down into the specifics of which investment products will give you the most bang for your buck. At the end of this process we should have a list of 10 to 20 products for you to put on your shopping list. Only 5 to 10 of them will ultimately end up in your portfolio, but we want to have choices.

We learn by example. In this lesson I show several examples of what a Plan B. looks like.