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I’ve been a fan of Phil Town for a very long time.
About ten years ago someone suggested that I read Rule One Investing, and it happened to come on the heels of reading The Snowball : Warren Buffett and The Business of Life. As it turned out, Town is a Buffett devotee. He’s been a student of W.B and Charlie Munger for decades and his investment philosophy is closely aligned with theirs. As I was extremely interested in learning about Buffett, I devoured Rule One Investing and was hooked on the strategy outlined.
Who Is Phil Town?
Phil has built an incredibly successful business, both as a fund manager AND as an information and training company. He essentially parlayed his success in investing into a NYT best-selling book (Rule One Investing) and then turned that book into a course that thousands (?) of people flock to on an annual basis.
To find out more about Phil, check out his website: www.RuleOneInvesting.com
To listen to Phil, check out his podcast: Invested Podcast with Phil Town
The course is the subject of this post, along with my candid break down of the information delivered and the sales pitch at the end.
Phil Town’s Rule One Investing Weekend
I attended Phil’s training in July of 2017 in Atlanta, Georgia with my cousin who had procured two tickets to the event. The tickets were given as a “scholarship” to a given number of people.
(My feeling is if you apply for the scholarship, you’re most likely going to get two tickets. The key to Phil’s business model working is to pump several hundred people through every class with the assumption that a quantity of them will subscribe to his software subscription offering.)
With the tickets to the weekend covered, the hard costs that you may be facing are food, travel and hotel stay. Phil and his team graciously cover dinner one night at his ranch which is very well organized and provides a display of Phil’s business success.
The training is both thorough, well designed and delivered, and super valuable IF you plan on growing your investments through Town’s methods. As a word of warning, while newbies and beginners DO attend the event, the level and complexity of some of the concepts for the uninitiated can be overwhelming. One look around the room during the options and short selling discussions told me some folks there were in way over their heads.
The training runs Friday through Sunday and the days can be very long. Imagine sitting through an advanced college course all weekend with short breaks for food. Friday start time was mid afternoon through late evening, Saturday was by far the longest day going from 7:30am to nearly 10pm, and Sunday was from 8:00 to around 2pm.
What’s covered?
Phil’s investing philosophy is very simple and straight forward: If you can buy a ten dollar bill for five dollars, you’ll never lose money.
He spends the majority of the weekend describing how to find these “on sale” companies and then how to invest in them to minimize the risk and optimize the return.
Some of this involves trading options (Trading) and some of this involves buying tranches of stock when it dips (Investing). The key to success in both is making sure that the indicators are all pointing to a successful trade or purchase prior to doing so. Essentially, you’ll be learning how to radically reduce risk in your investment portfolio, while shooting for double digit returns.
Town spends a great deal of time describing how he uses options to generate cash flow from his portfolio, as well as how to reduce the basis on a stock. The theory being that if you can reduce the basis down to next to nothing, everything you make on the stock is 100% profit. Put bluntly, what he described was so extremely logical to me, I questioned why I wasn’t doing it on everything. (When I got home from the event, I realized why I didn’t do it — this stuff takes a pretty serious time commitment to get proficient.)
My recommendation
Go. Take the free education all day long and expand your horizons as it relates to investing. On Saturday evening, I took some of the information that Phil had shared and applied it to 3 stocks I was holding in an unqualified trading account. Each of them was up significantly and Phil’s indicators were suggesting a pretty serious downturn on all three. Two out of the three went down the following week and I avoided the drop. One stock I bought that next week went up $12 a share in a matter of a month and I sold my position making a quick $1200 in 30 days or less.
The bottom line is the information Town teaches is incredible. It blows me away that people would pay $40-80,000 for a degree in finance and you can access training like this for nearly free.
The Offer
Phil has developed a software that does the calculations for you to find the stocks that are great buys, the ones that are on sale, the companies that are “Rule One” Companies. It’s $39 a month. I subscribed — and while I don’t use it as often as I probably should, the information provided is quite awesome.
I will say that while at the conference, I took a stab at the numbers:
200 people in attendance x 70% close rate x $39/mo x 12 months = $65,520
If he does 3 or 4 of these a year, he’s probably clearing a couple hundred thousand a year after expenses. But even more impressive is he’s probably using the ranch as a bonafide business expense.
Phil Town is an impressive, down to earth, and friendly guy. It’s hard not to like and trust him, and I think his heart is in the right place in what he’s doing. His goal is to transform the way people invest and he’s walking the talk.
Get Started with Phil’s Book- Rule #1
