My Map Up the Mountain, Part A: The MAX-Wealth Engine, The Market Professional Series, Essay 4

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The Market Professional Series, Essay 4, Part A

My Map Up the Mountain

Part A: The MAX-Wealth Engines

A jagged line, climbing.

Look up for a second. At the top of this page, and at the top of every essay in this series, there’s a small circle with a jagged line climbing up through a set of rising bars. Next to it are the words TRENDCALC Capital Management. If you’ve read the first three essays, you’ve already looked right at it at least three times.

I’ve looked at it more times than I can count. I created that symbol, my logo, for my business in 2019, and it has been part of my business ever since. It sits at the top of every one of these pages.

The idea behind it was simple. The market spins from bull to bear and from bear to bull, over and over, so I put two circular arrows spinning around and around the shaded areas under a jagged graph.

That circle holds something else for me, too. Reading the Old Testament, I kept seeing the same never-ending pattern, in individual men and in humanity as a whole. Their legs get knocked out from under them. They cry out to God on their knees and promise to be better. Relief comes, and in time they find the strength and courage to stand back up, make progress, and regain their confidence. Then they pound their own puffed-out chest, forget the lesson and the promise, say “I got this,” and go it alone. A few “lucky” victories inflate the ego until a man makes a god of himself. Then the world chops his legs out from under him again, and the whole cycle takes another turn.

Markets punish that same circle. Nothing sets an investor up for a hard fall quite like a few lucky wins mistaken for genius. For me, the only lasting way out of that circle is Christ, who took on the weight none of us could carry and showed the path home.

Even so, I never really saw it until this week.

I was marking up the last Market Professional essay in this series, the one about drawing a line in the sand. I had just written that the climb is never a straight line. It’s a jagged one. I started thinking we ought to have some kind of graphic or symbol to show that, something that would picture the climb the way it really happens. Then it hit me. Holy cow. It was already there. The symbol I was looking for was the one I had already created and had been using for my own business: a jagged line, climbing.

It’s hard to overstate how big that felt. That little line is exactly me. It’s who I had been, who I am, and who I always will be. It had been hiding in plain sight all along, right at the top of the page, in every business communication, and all over my TrendCalc website, and it took me this long to see it in full focus.

A promise at the end

In the last essay I told you a little about my father. He was a mostly cautious man who largely followed the conventional road, and near the end that road deserted him. What I didn’t tell you is what I said to him.

In those last days, my dad appeared to be unconscious. For four or five days he lay there, drifting in and out, never uttering a word. But when I would ask him a question, or tell him I loved him, he would squeeze my hand.

When time was running short, I promised him that I would keep climbing mountains of success, and I said that final “I love you.” He opened his eyes one last time and stared his son, Phil Jr., straight in the face. Our faces couldn’t have been more than ten inches apart. As far as I’m concerned, he saw a reflection of himself, looking right back at him.

I was wearing an “Embrace the Suck” T-shirt. The saying comes from Navy SEAL training. Neither my dad nor I was ever a SEAL, or went through anything like it. I own four of those shirts, and I wore one every day those last few weeks, including his last day and his last moment. I did it on purpose. It was my reminder that my dad, like every believer, would be at peace in the loving comfort of Christ, finally free of the pain and suffering of this world, while the rest of us are left behind to “embrace the suck” of losing someone we love.

My hope is that he got one last laugh out of it. For years, every Tuesday morning, he’d call me at 6 a.m. just to chat. We’d jokingly solve all the world’s problems, share fellowship and words of wisdom, say prayers for each other, and tell a lot of jokes.

I can’t prove that the promise and that jagged line are connected. Maybe they’re related. Maybe they’re two ways of saying the same thing, one drawn, one spoken, by the same stubborn son who never did learn to settle for good enough. What I know is that when I finally fully saw the line for exactly what it is, my mind went straight to that promise.

Climbs are never straight

Here’s what that little line gets right. Look at it closely. It doesn’t shoot straight up. It climbs, dips, climbs again, and keeps rising. Every real mountain I’ve climbed has looked like that, in markets, in business, and in my own life. Up, back, flat for a while, then up again.

Nobody climbs a mountain in a straight line. The trail switches back. You give up ground to gain it. Some days the best you can do is keep your footing and wait for the weather to clear. Wealth tends to arrive in chunks, not in neat, even steps, and the drawdowns along the way are part of the tuition you must pay. The smooth ride is a nice story. The jagged line is how climbing actually works.

That’s why I’ll never promise anyone a smooth ride. I’ll only tell you the truth about the climb: what to expect and be prepared to face, and how to equip and prepare yourself. It is not all sunshine and lollipops. The path is a jagged ridge of uneven terrain that calls for a multitude of physical, intellectual, and emotional skills and decision-making. Experience helps, and if you’re lacking in it, you’d better find yourself a guide, one who has made the climb successfully. And if the desire is there to go it on your own at some point, you can blaze your own trail. Just don’t do it while you’re dumb and inexperienced. What follows is me explaining my climb, and the equipment and skills I have, employ, and deploy.

This one is my map

The first three essays in this series were about things anyone can share. Who Market Professionals are. How they think. Why average is a choice. That tent is wide open, and I hope it stays that way. Plenty of good people have their own maps up the mountain, and I’m glad they do.

This essay is different. It’s personal, and it’s mine. The Market Professional Investing Approach, MPIA, is my own process, built over about forty years of trial and error, successes and failures, climbing, falling, getting back up, and climbing again. It’s the map I use for my own climb. It’s one map among many, and I’d never tell you it’s the only way up.

It’s a big map, so I’ve split it into two parts. This is Part A, and it’s about the engines that can do some climbing. In the pages that follow, I’ll walk you through what MPIA is and isn’t, the standard every strategy has to meet before it earns a seat, and the MAX-wealth engines I rely on to build transformative wealth. Part B covers the rest of the map: how I match money to time instead of to feelings, the preservation side, how I manage all kinds of risk and not just the few that a questionnaire asks about, and how all of it fits the investment side of a real financial and retirement plan.

Let’s start at the trailhead.

The trailhead: what MPIA is, and what it isn’t

Let me start with what MPIA isn’t. It isn’t a fund. It isn’t a model portfolio, a product, or a hot take. You can’t buy it off a shelf. It’s a thinking man’s approach to investment decision-making, a way of deciding, and I think of it as the operating system I use to build wealth. It largely describes a philosophy, a mindset and operating system for how I personally and professionally go about my business of MAX-wealth creation decision-making, whether it’s wealth in the wallet, of the mind, with the whom, or of the spirit, both consciously and subconsciously. And now I’m attempting, as best I can, to do more than speak it through my way of thinking, my words, and my decisions. I’m trying to write it all out in a form that can be read and understood without me being there to explain everything.

It isn’t the same thing as being a Market Professional. That label is open to anyone who has the characteristics, and I hope a lot of people grow into it. MPIA is something narrower and more personal. It’s my named, proprietary process: my map up the mountain. It covers the various paths and strategies I have used and still use, standalone or in various combinations, in pursuit of exponential alpha, the transformative wealth engines I rely on, how I manage all kinds of risk, and the investment side of financial and retirement plans and accounts.

That last part matters. Plenty of good professionals do excellent work on the planning side of a family’s finances. MPIA lives on the investment decision-making side, where somebody has to decide what to buy, what to keep holding, and what to let go and sell. All three of those words matter. A Market Professional has a reason to own something, a reason to keep owning it, and a reason that will make him sell. Everything in MPIA grows out of that.

The bar every strategy has to clear

Before any money goes to work, I decide how much of each dollar belongs in growth at all, and I decide that by time and facts, not feelings. That’s where Part B starts. This part assumes the dollar has already earned its place in growth, and asks the next question: which standalone strategy or combination of strategies gets to do the growing? Nothing gets a seat just because it’s popular, comfortable, exciting, or presumed investing wisdom.

Every investment idea starts with the bar I wrote about in the first essay: the hurdle rate, which is true inflation, measured by the growth of the money supply, plus a risk premium for the risks being taken. If something has little or no chance of clearing that bar, it makes little investment sense, no matter how good it feels.

The MAX-wealth engines face a higher bar still. I hold every one of them to a benchmark I call the exponential alpha standard: a realistic potential to beat the broad market by a wide margin, not a sliver, and over five years or more. That’s an aim, not a promise, and I’ll never present it as anything else. If a strategy can’t realistically get there, or at least have a reasonable possibility of getting there, it doesn’t earn a seat. Never let good enough be good enough applies to strategies, too.

That bar keeps me honest, too. It’s easy to fall in love with a strategy because it worked last year, or because it’s clever, or because everybody’s talking about it. The bar doesn’t care about any of that. Either a strategy has a realistic shot at doing the job, or it sits on the bench.

I’ll be just as straight about what that bar costs. Transformative wealth is never built in smooth, incremental amounts. It tends to arrive in chunks. It goes flat, and it goes negative at times. Nobody really likes that. But it’s the price, the tuition, you absolutely must pay for any shot at exposure to asymmetric bets and the possibilities of exponential alpha over time.

The engines

Here’s how the map is built today. I think of it as two macro classes of strategy engines. The first macro class is my MAX-wealth growth engines, the transformative wealth engines that do the climbing. The second macro class sits off to the side with a different job entirely: preservation. I’ll describe them as families, in plain language. The specific rules and the live lists stay private, the way every serious practitioner’s do. There are four MAX-wealth engines for consideration on my map today, and this part is about them.

Figure 1. Two macro classes: the MAX-wealth engines that do the climbing, and preservation.

Exponential Alpha Top10 (EA10)

The thesis: wealth piles up at the top, so concentrate on the bigs.

This MAX-wealth engine is built on a simple, yet powerful idea: own some combination of the largest companies in the market, then change and adapt periodically, as warranted, to stay current with them. Look back over the last fifty years, and really the last hundred or more, and a recurring pattern shows up and repeats. In every era, and even every decade, a handful of companies tend to rise to the top. They disrupt the way things were being done, and they pull in capital like gravity. Most of the wealth made in each of those stretches was made in a small number of names that went from upstarts to the giants of their day. This engine is built to concentrate on the companies that have risen to a leadership role by market cap size, and to keep owning them while they stay there. It isn’t set-and-forget. It is dynamically watched and up for updating at least quarterly, with changes made when the process calls for them.

Trend Following

The thesis: price already knows, so simplify down to supply and demand.

Wall Street argues endlessly about earnings, rates, and valuations, and much of the advice industry favors buy-and-hold and broad diversification. Trend Following takes a different road. It is one of the most straightforward math-and-engineering approaches to MAX-wealth building I know: pure rules applied to price.

Price already reflects it all. The process simply follows supply and demand as they show up in price, and lets that make the buy, hold, and sell decisions. Trend Following aims to cut losses short and let winners run, and it accepts many small losing trades as the cost of staying in the game.

The mindset held within this strategy engine is this: I can’t predict a damn thing, and neither can anyone else. Most forecasting is guessing, and most people are bad at it. Systematic rules keep a portfolio ready for up markets, down markets, and the shocks that catch those who trusted the prevailing narrative by surprise, over and over again. Rules decide entry, exit, and size. Opinions, forecasts, and conventional wisdom don’t get a vote.

Followed with discipline, that shape is one of the cleanest ways I know to pursue exponential alpha. It’s an aim, not a promise.

Market Disruptor Asymmetric Bets

The thesis: read the room before the crowd. Market disruptors can shift the flow of capital like a tidal wave.

These are positions where the possible upside is many times the possible loss, usually in disruptive companies much earlier in their rise. This engine hunts for up-and-coming disruptors in technology and innovation, and it owns a small number of them earlier, while the establishment is still telling people not to worry. Some approaches look backward, what you might call rearview-mirror investing, and own yesterday’s champions after the fact. This one looks ahead.

They’re small on purpose. Each one is sized so that if it goes all the way to zero, it’s a bruise, not a funeral, and with proper sizing it might go truly unfelt. And each one has to earn its place with a written case for why it could matter, not a tip or a hunch. That’s the difference between an asymmetric bet and a gamble. A gamble hopes. An asymmetric bet is sized, reasoned, and written down. Where a trend following engine lets price decide, this one rides a written case, with every bet sized small enough to survive being wrong.

It tends to have a low batting average, and that’s fine. The hope, not a promise, is that a few winners make up for a string of small, expected losses. When one really catches on, it can climb far enough to be recognized by trend following strategies, and the best of the best can go on to reach Exponential Alpha Top10 status. Look at the biggest companies in the S&P 500 or the Nasdaq-100, and you’ll notice many, maybe most, were significant market disruptors on the way there. That handoff is the cleanest way I know to describe how strategy engines relate. This one scouts the disruptors on the way up. Trend Following recognizes them as price confirms. EA10 owns them once they’re at the top.

Figure 2. The handoff: disruptors scouted early, confirmed by price, owned at the top.

It stays small by design. It isn’t foundationally needed to reach MAX-wealth exponential alpha. It’s an added extra, an enhancement to an already established plan: a small engine with room for an occasional big move.

Bitcoin

The thesis: money built to hold its shape.

I’m including Bitcoin as an example of how some people think about it, not as a recommendation. My broker-dealer does not permit me to recommend Bitcoin, so take this as education and nothing more.

Every plan is measured in dollars, and the supply of dollars keeps growing, so each one buys a little less. That’s monetary risk, and most plans ignore it. Some people treat Bitcoin as a possible fourth engine. It’s built differently from the other three. Some use it both as a growth engine and as a hedge against that dilution. Its supply is fixed by its own rules, not by committees, and no single company or government runs it.

It’s also as volatile as anything gets, as true a bucking bronco roller coaster as there is. Its price has fallen steeply more than once, and it can again. The people who hold it through that tend to hold on thesis, not on price. The question they keep asking is “Has the reason changed?” and not “Is it down this week?” And they write down, ahead of time, what would prove the thesis wrong. It isn’t the preservation side of the map, either. That job belongs to a different engine entirely.

Whether Bitcoin belongs in anyone’s life at all, and in what form, is a personal call. Do your own homework, think for yourself, and trust, but verify. That goes double here.

And/all: how the engines play together

The industry teaches asset diversification: own a slice of everything so no single thing can hurt you too much. The trouble is that it also tends to keep any single thing from helping you very much. Spread your best ideas thin enough and you’ve diluted them into average. That’s average-averaging, and it’s very good at producing exactly what it’s built to produce.

I can use diversification to manage volatility risk too, but I’ve found it useful to diversify at the strategy level, not just across assets. Each engine is its own set of skilled, disciplined buy, hold, and sell decisions, each with its own job. When you put them together, they can be seen as instruments in an orchestra, so when multiple strategies are called for, I like to call the combination a symphony. The symphony is simply different combinations of the MAX-wealth engines. EA10 owns the leaders. Trend Following lets price decide. Asymmetric Bets scouts the disruptors early. Bitcoin answers a question about the money itself.

This is where either/or to and/all can earn its keep. It’s not EA10 or Trend Following. It’s not growth or preservation. It’s all of them, each doing the job it’s independently best at, so the whole can do more than any one part could alone. Combining strategies that way adds to the best ideas instead of watering them down.

Figure 3. A symphony of strategies: each engine plays its own part.

A side note: managing symphony combinations is high-end, high-effort, time-consuming work. I mention it because, in my view, EA10 on its own may be all the growth engine many people need. That’s an opinion, not a promise.

The other end of the bar

There’s one more engine on my map, and it isn’t trying to climb fast. It’s the second macro class, preservation, something I like to call The Minimizer. Its formal name is the TC StableValue LowVol strategy. Its job is to hold the money matched to nearer-term needs beyond the coming year (money needed within the year sits in cash or money markets), and to help offset the MAX-wealth engines’ drawdowns in bear markets. It’s designed to lower volatility risk and provide more portfolio principal stability, but that is not a promise. It doesn’t eliminate risk, and nothing about it is guaranteed.

Pairing a minimizer with the MAX-wealth engines is how I attempt to control risk without watering the MAX-wealth engines down. It’s also where the investment side of my map meets the financial and retirement plan, and the way each account is actually managed. That’s a big enough subject to deserve its own essay, so it gets one: Part B of this essay.

So those are the engines that are designed to do the MAX-wealth climbing. Each one has its own job and its own rules, and none of them promises a smooth ride. Look up at the top of this page one more time. A jagged line, climbing. Engines are what move you up that line. They aren’t what keeps you on the mountain.

In Part B, I’ll show you the other half of the map: how I match every dollar to the time it will be needed, a “barbelled spectrum” that puts The Minimizer on one end and the MAX-wealth engines on the other, and how I manage the risks a questionnaire never asks about, including a closer look at the risk tolerance questionnaire, the RTQ, and why a score on a form isn’t where my map starts.

See you on the mountain.

* * *

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.