The Market Professional, Old-School Principles, Finally Given a Name

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The Market Professional Series, Essay 1

The Market Professional

Old-School Principles, Finally Given a Name

The Index Is the Floor, Not the Finish Line

In about forty years in this business, I've noticed that the best investors have something in common, and most of them never bothered to give it a name. They didn't buy a little of everything and hope for the best. They made decisions. They figured out where wealth was actually being created, put real money behind their best ideas, knew why they owned what they owned, and knew what would make them sell. They took their lumps in the bad years, stayed in the game, and kept climbing.

I call those people Market Professionals.

It isn't a title, a license, or a job description. You'll find Market Professionals running their own money, building a business, buying real estate, backing small startups, and, yes, working in the advice business. You'll also find plenty of impressive titles on people who aren't Market Professionals at all. They're Marketing Professionals: experts at marketing and selling prepackaged, off-the-shelf investment solutions, whether it's an actual product or a service, but not equipped to make real buy-hold-sell decisions.

Here's where I draw the line, and it's simpler than most people expect. The real dividing line in investing isn't active versus passive. It's whether you aim for the average or treat the average as the floor. A Market Professional makes real buy-hold-sell decisions and owns the outcome. A Marketing Professional sells a product, or a service, built to stay close to the index.

It's whether you aim for the average or treat the average as the floor.

I have nothing against the index. It's the perfect starting line for sound investing, and for a lot of people it may be all they need. But for a Market Professional, the index is the floor, not the finish line.

I want to be clear about one thing up front. I didn't invent these principles, and I don't own them. They're old-school. All I've done is finally give the people who practice them a name.

There's one extra test for the advisors, and I'll get to it. You don't take directions up a mountain from someone who hasn't climbed it.

The real dividing line

A Market Professional is someone who can competently and successfully make systematic buy-hold-sell investment decisions in real time, for himself or herself and for others. That's the definition I put on the TrendCalc site back in 2019, and I still haven't found a better one. All three words matter: buy, hold, and sell. They have a reason to own something, a reason to keep owning it, and a reason that will make them let it go. They operate. They make real decisions and own the outcomes, good, bad, and indifferent.

A Marketing Professional, on the other hand, is an expert at marketing and selling prepackaged, off-the-shelf investment solutions, but isn't equipped to make actionable buy-hold-sell decisions. To a Marketing Professional, it's always a good time to buy. Ask about their sell discipline and you'll likely hear silence. There's a dirty little secret in financial services: "sell" is one of those four-letter bad words to many. Count the letters if you like. It still is.

Where a Market Professional operates, a Marketing Professional acts as a custodian. The Marketing Professional holds and maintains what the firm has approved. The fit isn't perfect. An investor can be a custodian of their own money, and plenty of custodians mean well. Many run what I call average-averaging simply because it's the default. It's what they were trained to do, paid to do, and expected to do.

Where a Market Professional operates, a Marketing Professional acts as a custodian.

I want to be fair here. Most, not all, are decent, well-meaning people. My problem isn't necessarily with them. It's with the model that they push, promote, and market as the pinnacle of smart and intelligent investing.

I have a name for anyone, investor or advisor, who aims for the average: an average-averager. It's mostly a description. Mostly. The line is about aim and decision process, not labels. One aims for average. The other treats average as the floor.

Not a title, and not active versus passive

It isn't a title or a credential. My industry is full of impressive titles, and most, not all, of the people wearing them are Marketing Professionals.

And the line doesn't run only through advisors. It runs through investors too. As I've written on the TrendCalc site, what separates a market professional investor from most amateurs is "a written rules-based discipline that governs decision-making," instead of buying and selling driven by emotion, bias, and inexperience.

Nor is it active versus passive. Years ago, my own research started as a hunt for an "either/or" answer and ended with an "and/all" one. From either/or to and/all. The label says nothing about whether anyone is actually deciding.

So let me be fair to the index. Index funds are low-cost, tax-efficient, and simple, and they protect a lot of people from their own worst decisions. That's the greatness of index funds, and it's why the index is the perfect starting point, the starting line, for sound investing. For many people, it may supply all the investment growth their plans need. For others, it's just a floor and a start. As I wrote on the TrendCalc site, "Passive investing has great benefits... Passive works well, but not always, and not throughout full market cycles." The studies that say nobody beats the market are mostly true in what they find. What they don't measure is a case I'll make later in this series.

The open tent

None of this is my invention. The investing greats have been investing this way for generations.

There's no holy grail, and there's no single path. Some Market Professionals concentrate in the big market disruptors. Others concentrate in real estate, in small venture-capital startups, in traditional fundamental analysis, or in a variety of areas in between. The paths are wide and broad. Some are more successful than others. Some are more efficient, faster roads. What they share is some kind of concentration: of effort, if not of resources, financial or otherwise.

There's no holy grail, and there's no single path.

Anyone who holds to these principles, whether they run their own money or advise others, has every right to call themselves a Market Professional. This is a big tent, and the door is open.

The climb and the map

For anyone who holds themselves out as a Market Professional advisor, I'd say this is one of the defining principles. Advice professionals should not only eat their own cooking. They should have built the preponderance of their personal wealth from their own advice and investment decision-making, not from the sales and marketing fees they earned telling everyone else what to do.

Any Market Professional investment advisor must first be, or become, a successful investment Market Professional. If you're an investor client looking for the best help, you don't want to take advice from someone who has yet to climb the mountain themselves. You should want someone who not only climbed the mountain but was successful at it. You shouldn't want someone just selling maps of their climb, or worse, someone selling maps of a climb they never made.

You don't take directions up a mountain from someone who hasn't climbed it.

I can only speak from my own climb. I've made my investment decisions with my own money first and lived with the results, in the good years and the ugly ones. That's why I largely don't offer or recommend anything to anyone that I don't already have my own money in, and that only happens after rigorous, robust testing with my own money.

There are a few exceptions, and they come from the rules of the field I'm playing on. For many years I've had the good fortune to count public universities among my clients, working as a retirement provider representative to their employees. Those universities have their own individual plans, with a specific lineup of options, different from the private-sector plans I'm subject to. Working with those employees is a privilege that could be revoked for any reason, so I play on the ball fields, and by the expectations, set for me, and adjust my guidance, advice, and recommendations accordingly.

That's how the great investors have always worked. They lead by example.

What Market Professionals have in common

Strip away the titles and the methods, and Market Professionals share a handful of characteristics.

They make real decisions, and they write the rules down. A Market Professional works from a written, rules-based process, not a gut feeling. We can all be our own worst enemy, especially with our own biases and emotional decision-making. Defined rules keep emotions from interfering with otherwise sound decisions. They let you judge your process, not just the outcome, and they give you patience. The rules are the recipe. The discipline is the cook.

They hold every idea to an honest bar. Before a Market Professional asks whether an investment is exciting, they ask whether it can clear the bar. The government's printed CPI rate is the inflation number for the average-averagers, the non-professionals, the amateurs. The honest measure is the growth in the number of dollars in existence, the M2 money supply. That's how fast your dollars are really being watered down. And that's just the start. I add more on top of it to set the hurdle rate I judge by, and I'd bet most other Market Professionals add something more as well. If an investment, belief, or strategy idea has little or no chance of clearing that bar, it doesn't deserve capital put to work in it. You either clear the hurdle rate or you're doing a slow bleed to eventual death financially.

Sadly, most people don't even recognize this as a risk, and most of those who do won't do anything about it. If I had to pick the one risk to battle above all others, it would be this one. It's money's version of cancer, the silent killer. It grows out of sight, and by the time the symptoms show, it's accelerating, sometimes past the point of no return.

They aim past average. Market Professionals aim for maximum wealth creation. Not "reasonable growth." Not "keeping pace." It isn't about comparing your pile of wealth to anybody else's. It's about letting you and your family, or anyone and theirs, take real steps up the ladder of life and living standards: financial independence, economic freedom, and more authority over your own life. I've never understood why, as people approach and reach retirement age, conventional wisdom expects them to downsize and plan on living on less. Yet this is the very expectation that has been drilled so deep into everyone's thinking that it's just a given. Shouldn't the goal be to keep your standard of living, and even raise it, into and through retirement?

Never let good enough be good enough. Being just good enough is the work and effort of average-averaging, of conventional wisdom. It isn't bad. It's just good enough. Average was never the goal of any of the great investors, the Market Professionals. So why should it be yours?

They concentrate where they truly know. The key to maximum wealth creation is concentration on your best ideas, not blind diversification across less productive assets until hitting average is the expectation, the pinnacle, the best you can ever do. In every era, a handful of companies rise to the top, disrupt the way things were done, and pull in capital like gravity, going from upstarts to giants.

The big market disruptors are one of those areas where I've found easier, not easy, and more efficient paths. That's an example, not a recommendation. It's also the industrial and systems engineer in me, always looking for the most efficient means of producing anything. Wherever you concentrate, the key is to focus your efforts in areas you truly know and understand, and then manage the heck out of it, so you don't blow yourself up or let the market blow you up. Concentration doesn't mean putting everything on one bet. It means your best ideas get real weight, you know why you own each one, and you size each position so that being wrong is survivable.

They know risk is traded, never eliminated. How a Market Professional understands risk is one of the defining distinctions. Most investors and advice professionals narrowly limit risk to volatility and shorter-term loss. They tend to ignore the longer-term risk of never building the wealth that lets a family climb. That's a huge failure in guidance and advice, and an even bigger, more damaging lack of investor prudence.

Avoiding risk is the risk. Risk can never be eliminated. It can only be traded for something else. Trade away concentration and drawdowns to buy a smooth ride, and you trade concentration risk for return-mediocrity risk, and the risk of looking wrong in the short term for the risk of being broke and/or downsized in the long term. That's the price of admission for the climb to investing success and transformative wealth. Transformative wealth tends to arrive in chunks, not smooth increments. So a Market Professional doesn't try to smooth drawdowns out. They manage them. They size positions so a bad stretch is a bruise and not a funeral. You'll learn as much from your drawdowns as from your victories, likely more. And you don't want to waste your great compounding years on so much risk mitigation that you never give yourself a real shot at the wealth you were aiming for.

Trust, but verify

Being a Market Professional asks something of you, too. You get what your decisions produce, including the decision about whom you trust for information, guidance, and advice. That's my first principle of first principles, on decisions and the choices of influence.

So check the work of whoever you listen to. Ask anyone who wants to advise you to explain how they make investment decisions for themselves and for others, including when they sell. Ask whether they've been through at least two full bear-to-bull, bull-to-bear market cycles. Trust, but verify, especially the big stuff. That goes for me, too. In the end, it all starts, hinges, and ends with personal agency.

Old principles, one name

Strip it down and a Market Professional makes real decisions by written rules, holds every idea to an honest bar, and aims past average, so they and their family can climb those mountains of success. They concentrate where they truly know and trade risk with their eyes open. If they advise others, they climbed the mountain first. And they expect you to verify all of it.

None of that is new. I just gave the people who practice it a name, so we can finally talk about them plainly and teach the principles on purpose. If those principles describe you, you're a Market Professional, whatever you call yourself and however you put them to work.

Next in this series comes the Market Professional mindset. After that, I'll draw a line in the sand, because average is a choice. And over the years, I've worked out my own map up the mountain. I call it the Market Professional Investing Approach, MPIA. It's mine, one map among many, and it's the last essay in this series.

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Author Note

This is part of an ongoing series on TrendCalc.net examining how conventional frameworks have constrained real wealth creation — and how a more market professional investing approach can change the outcomes.

At my +60 age, when many in the advice professional business are winding down or fully retiring, I find myself more energized and purposeful than ever. After more than 40+ years as a financial advisor, I’ve made a deliberate shift from the conventional model I was initially taught and had once practiced to one centered on true wealth creation, client agency, and economic sovereignty. I have little personal interest in traditional retirement. Instead, I’m driven to help as many individuals and families as possible reach the “promise land” of transformative wealth — the kind that funds real steps up the ladder of life, higher living standards, and genuine financial independence and economic freedom.

My goal is to equip people with the knowledge, mindset, and decision-making frameworks to achieve abundance and purpose rather than settle into scarcity, stress, and fear of running out. Whether that happens directly through a client relationship or indirectly — by readers gaining the understanding and confidence to become far better investors and stewards of their own capital — the mission remains the same: to help as many others foster greater personal self-sovereignty, autonomy, and the freedom to live life on their own terms. What I’ve learned cannot be allowed to die with me; it must be shared so others can build stronger, more secure futures for themselves and their families.

Important Disclaimer

This article is provided for general educational and informational purposes only. It is not intended to provide personalized financial, investment, tax, legal, or other professional advice. The concepts, frameworks, and examples discussed are general in nature and may not be suitable for every individual’s unique financial situation, risk tolerance, or goals. Achieving financial independence, economic freedom, or any level of personal self-sovereignty depends on many factors, including market conditions, personal circumstances, and disciplined execution. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Readers should consult with a qualified financial advisor, tax professional, or other appropriate licensed professional before making any financial decisions. The author and publisher do not guarantee any specific outcomes and are not responsible for any losses or damages that may result from the application of the ideas presented.