By Ryan Starr
Wed., Oct. 6, 2010
Keith Betty’s online investing guide has been a handy and free resource for do-it-yourselfers since the retired chemist launched it nearly a decade ago. You can read it on your computer or download it as a 109-page document, but either way, Shakespeare’s Investment Primer aims to help you take control of your investments and offers a step by step approach to do that. From setting goals and developing a plan, to defining your tolerance for risk, the guide walks you through the important steps to building and managing a portfolio.
DIY investing may not be for everyone and some may be turned off by the site which isn’t modern-looking or user-friendly. But a little perseverance pays off, and if you dig in a little, you’ll find what you want. “There’s a great deal of detail here,” says Tom Hamza, president of the Investor Education Fund, the organization established by the Ontario Securities Commission to help small investors. “We applaud any efforts to spread information in an unbiased way.”
Betty, 61, grew up in Alberta and later earned a PhD in chemistry before coming to Ontario, where he spent 20 years working for Eldorado Nuclear Ltd. (now Cameco Corp.) and Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. He took early retirement in 1998 when he was 50 and moved to Lethbridge. But he knew his pension wouldn’t be enough to live on, so he’d have to make up the income another way.
“It was clear from the start that I was going to have to live off my portfolio,” he says. He had invested throughout his working life and, lacking any education in accounting or economics courses, made plenty of mistakes. “My Bay Street education has probably had a higher dollar cost than did my 10 years of university education,” he writes in the primer. Betty started the guide in 2001 while he was a regular on The Wealthy Boomer online forum, a place where other investors came to talk and offer advice. “The primer was an attempt to pull some of that information together,” Betty says in an interview. “Doing it enabled me to order the information in my own mind.” The first version was about half a dozen pages, put together in two weeks. It has gradually grown into a small book. He posted it online because he wanted to make it available to anyone who was interested, since it was assembled from the collected wisdom of other investors like him.
Betty hasn’t made a penny from his work and has no plans to. “The reward is in the feedback indicating (the guide) is of use to others,” he says. The primer’s name was inspired partly by the fact that Betty’s father was an amateur Shakespearean actor. “If I had to do it over again I’d pick something a less flamboyant,” he says. But he made enough good decisions that he was eventually able to live off his portfolio. His average annual rate of return, before inflation, has been 8.7 per cent, he says, though he acknowledges the portfolio took a big hit during the recession.
While Betty has done well as a self-taught investor, he doesn’t think everyone can go it alone.
“Very few people have the discipline, the interest, and the capability to be a successful do-it-yourself investor,” he says.
“The vast majority of people should have an adviser.”
If you do decide to run your own show, though, Betty says the key is to determine your risk level.
“You’re probably not going to know that until you lose money,” he says.
“There’s that old investing aphorism: You can eat well or you can sleep well, but you can’t do both.”
Ryan Starr is a Toronto freelance writer.