If you’ve never seen the original Karate Kid movie, it’s well worth your time - both as entertainment and as a life lesson that can inspire you to prepare for one of the biggest battles of life – investing for retirement. Perhaps you can picture yourself as Daniel (i.e the Karate Kid), the new kid in Investment town where you are over-matched by well trained adversaries such as the Karate School bullies who use their superior training to keep you down.
You need a way to even the odds, or even better, get the odds in your favor. Unfortunately, the gap between you and them seems large. But like the Karate Kid, you reach the point where you need to close the gap and get this part of your life handled. Of course we all want a quick and easy route to overcoming our challenge. The Karate Kid (named Daniel in the movie) found a teacher in Mr. Miyagi – a mild mannered handyman who demonstrated that his knowledge of Karate was more than a match for the school bullies tormenting Daniel. Daniel asked for fight training and Mr. Miyagi gave him – chores.
Miyagi had Daniel paint a fence, sand the decks, and then wax the car. Sound like drudgery? It turns out that all that seemingly irrelevant work was preparing Daniel by training his muscles the core moves of Karate. Although Daniel was upset at all the work he had to do, it had in fact prepared him for battle.

You also have chores to prepare yourself for investing. Sure you can just pick a fund quickly but, like the Karate Kid, maybe you’ve found that fighting first without preparation gets you hurt. I’m betting that you’re ready to get this part of your life handled. You’ve had some investments that didn’t get you where you wanted to be and you know there must be a better way.
The Karate Kid made some mistakes. He got hit a few times. But, he decided to persist and put in the effort. He was hurt but he hung tough to apply what he learned and he won his battle and along with it, earned the respect of his foe.
The moral for investing is good results come from the effort to find a good strategy and persistence in applying it.
At Kazio we’ve done most of the hard work for you by pulling together and analyzing the data on mutual funds using a statistically proven methodology. Still you will need to do some work to use these “teachings” to gain an advantage, and you will need to be persistent.
With practice it will be easy and satisfying – it’s all about repeating what works!