About Me

Welcome to the SmartKnowledgeU™ The Zen of Investing blog. I’m J.S. Kim, and I’m the founder of SmartKnowledgeU™ and the revolutionary MoneyPing™ Analysis strategies of investing. MoneyPing™ Analysis leverages the flattening of the world to dramatically decrease the risk of investing while intelligently increasing the possibility of annual returns of 25% or higher. Our goal is to provide you with an alternative approach to identifying investment opportunities. Some people call it contrarian. I call it digging down the rabbit hole. Our full website will be coming soon, so please check back with us.

During the seven years I worked in the Private Client Services decision of two Fortune 500 global financial powerhouses, I constantly found myself questioning the investment strategies taught to me.

I thought - “How could I have graduated from a university (the University of Pennsylvania) perennially ranked with Harvard, Princeton and Yale as one of the best universities in the world (by U.S. News & World Report), and earned not one, but two master degrees, a Master in Business Administration, and a Master in Public Policy at a school that boasted the top ranked accounting program in the U.S. and an ex-U.S. Secretary of Defense among its staff, but yet still be taught to rely on the exact same plain-vanilla investment strategies as 90 other financial consultants at my office?”

Furthermore, I thought – “Why am I being taught investment strategies that strip away my intelligence and creative strengths instead of allowing me to leverage them?

If you’ve ever been a client of Goldman Sachs, Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, or Morgan Stanley, I’m sure that you’ve heard these same strategies repeatedly –

“Diversification is essential, We utilize Modern Portfolio Theory, Expect 8% to 10% returns annually, Markets are 100% efficient, You can’t time the market, and so on.”

And I must admit that while I worked at these firms, I actually believed most of these mantras. Why? Because these huge firms pounded into my brain that I was in the best training program in the world and with the best firm in the best offices (San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Beverly Hills). It was the job of top management to get me to believe them. After all, if I didn’t buy in to these strategies, how would I get my clients to buy in?

When I left the industry, I started thinking about my own portfolio. I thought to myself, How is 8% to 10% annually going to make me rich?

I realized that almost every investment concept taught to me by large investment firms were wrong because at their root, they had two things in common –

(1) The end goal to close a sale, and

(2) The provision of a system that would allow thousands of financial consultants to invest not millions, but billions, of dollars of assets in the least amount of time possible (so they could spend most of their time gathering more assets).

Unfortunately the above two goals are entirely different than the goal of maximizing the returns of clients’ stock portfolios. Thus, I came to a crossroad. I could continue to use the strategies I had learned at these firms and settle for 6% to 8% returns a year, or I could develop my own strategies.

When I first started thinking about how I could earn 20% or higher annual returns, this rarified territory reserved for the likes of the Warren Buffets of the world seemed impossible. But once I spent months dissecting my inside knowledge about the sales-driven strategies at huge global investment houses, I realized that not only was this possible, but that it was very probable! I started my new quest by applying everything I had ever learned into the development of a new investment paradigm.

Surprisingly, I didn’t come up with much at all when I scoured my MBA education. So I turned my attention to my Public Policy degree. It was this base of knowledge that birthed the first of my MoneyPing™ Analysis strategies. I found that understanding the numerous links between politics and economics helped me select 11 stocks that produced unbelievable average returns of 31.20% over 15 months (during this same time span, the major stock index returned only 6%).

Then, I took my knowledge about how information flows through media channels gained from a graduate level journalism course. I discovered that markets were nowhere near 100% efficient though every major investment firm preaches this as “fact”. So I dug deeper, and I found changes in security laws that allowed me to uncover information that was impossible to know just five years ago. From this knowledge, I developed my second MoneyPing™ Analysis strategy.

In the middle of developing these strategies, I moved from the United States to Asia. There during my business travels in Korea, Japan, China, and Thailand, using a strategy taught to me by a U.S. Navy SEAL (who trained me in martial arts for four years), I was able to uncover three stocks that returned over 100% in a year’s time.

I realized then, that believe it or not, that a lot of martial arts training had applicability to investing as well. That’s why I attach master martial arts practitioner Kaheo’s commentary to almost every one of my blog posts - to give you investment advice from a martial artist’s perspective.