Andy is a renowned paper assets expert and successful business owner and investor:
- He is known for his ability to teach key techniques for stock options investing.
- He is probably even better known for being the right hand man of Rich Dad Poor Dad author Robert Kiyosaki.
In 2008, Andy was key in helping develop and launch Rich Dad’s Stock Success System:
This System teaches investors advanced technical trading techniques to profit from bull and bear markets.
He is the author of two books:
- 401(k)aos For Early Financial Freedom.
- Stock Market Cash Flow, a Rich Dad Advisor book on paper asset investing.
Andy's clear style made this last book a bestseller.
That's when Andy created his Cashflow Academy, and the weekly podcast of the same name:
- His aim is to give power and confidence to individual investors to manage their own money instead of turning it over to money managers.
- His Four Pillars of Investing theory has become so popular that it has been converted into a course.
- The course has been around for almost 10 years, but Andy keeps it fresh by updating it often.
I really enjoyed taking this course, because I have had a go at investing part of what I earn from my Lead Generation Business.
I can tell you, it was much easier to understand what was going on after reading the book and taking the whole course.
During this review, I really want to answer the questions that you really want to know the answer to.
Until 2014, like many of the people Andy wants to help, I was working in a corporate job 9-5.
It crushed my soul, and didn't give me any time to pursue my bigger goals.
That was until I discovered a method to rank sites organically, generating free leads for my clients.
That website you see above, for the tree care company, I created that site in 2015, and since then I haven't had to touch or update it:
It has gained me a passive income of $2000 a month.
That's more than $100,000 for one site, in 5 years.
And that's when I had enough money to try my hand at investing.
That's the magic of the Lead Generation business, it's by far the best model to generate passive income. If you want to know more, just hop over here!
But enough about me: time for an in-depth review of the The 4 Pillars of Investing course!
The 4 Pillars of Investing Course
The 4 Pillars of Investing is divided into, you guessed it, four main areas:
- Fundamentals Analysis.
- Technical Analysis.
- Cash Flow.
- Risk Management.
There are also some resources for the Japanese and the Chinese markets.
But the meat and potatoes of the course are learning the 4 core principles by heart.
There are some special bonuses that will get your investing juices flowing, though!
1 - Fundamentals Analysis
First things first, right?
You gotta cover your fundamentals before you can go spend that hard-earned cash!
So what exactly are you going to be learning in this module?
- You will understand valuation (good deal vs bad deal).
- You will analyze current stocks and practice w/o $$$ first.
- You will learn fundamentals vocabulary essentials.
- You will learn how it all relates to debt, inflation and currency.
- You will set fundamental analysis criteria.
Not a bad set of skills to kick off with, right?
To make things even easier, Andy breaks down the various stages you will be going through:
- Ignorance.
- Awareness.
- Competence.
- Proficiency.
This course aims to take you from the first stage to the second.
By the end of it you'll have a basic understanding of the fundamentals.
The fundamentals explanation has been adapted to fit with Kiyosaki's fourfold diagram of Cash Flow and Equity.
If you're familiar with that, life will be much easier, I tell you.
The main concepts to take into account when calculating fundamentals are:
- Income.
- Expenses.
- Asset.
- Liability.
This is pure Robert Kiyosaki theories, but Andy has done a good job in adapting to them.
But just so that you can be absolutely clear on these concepts, Andy applies them to:
- The US government, showing how printing money increases inflation.
- Other foreign countries with high debt to GDP ratios.
- Large corporations and why they failed.
All of this can be easily translated back to your position as a private citizen.
Andy's comparison between Apple and Blockbuster utilizing Kiyosaki's Income Statement and Balance Sheet was also a good way to explain things:
- Apple uses their liabilities to reinvest money.
- Blockbuster is obsolescent and will go bust.
- Apple understand the difference between Price and Value.
- Apple has played on its Value and Fund. Analysis will teach you to find it.
The last three suggestions that Andy gives, when checking the fundamentals of a company and deciding whether to invest in it are:
- Checking out how it did in the past years.
- Check out the competition. Why is your choice the best?
- Is this company about to boom? Do you know why?
I love Andy's teaching style, there is much to be learned from his no-nonsense approach.
2 - Technical Analysis
With the Second Pillar, Technical Analysis, you are now able to get your hands dirty:
- You'll learn basic chart reading.
- You will understand how your stocks are doing.
- You'll learn the jargon often tied to technical analysis.
- You'll learn how to use specific tools for the task.
- You'll learn technical analysis criteria.
While fundamental analysis shows you what could happen in the future, technical will more or less tell you when it is going to happen.
That is why knowing both is going to make or break your investing career.
A balance of both is going to be paramount in knowing when to buy or sell!
Andy is super clear in explaining what it is that drives prices of stocks up or down:
- Supply.
- Demand.
So the study of price action will give you charts, and by that you can learn a lot.
A share going up means people didn't want to sell, so the price had to go up in order to convince people to get rid of that share.
Viceversa, if the price is real low, that means many people were willing to sell, so people outbid themselves low to be able to sell their stock.
This is how support prices and resistance prices have to be read:
People don't want to sell beneath a certain price, nor buy above a certain other price.
The way Andy looks at technical analysis is not by learning to read the charts in a perfect way and having a 100% answer.
That may lead to disaster.
What you should do is learn to understand the feeling of certain charts, not unlike the weather forecast predicts the weather!
Andy then goes into patterns and teaches us the meaning of:
- The Uptrend.
- The Double Top.
- The Kiss Goodbye.
- Downtrends.
Patterns don't predict the future, but they make it easier to make informed decisions.
That's where Alert and Confirmations come into play.
Follow the stock very closely now:
If it carries on behaving the way you had predicted, that's the time to make a move, and you are ready to go for the buy or the sell!
Always remember though:
- An uptrend translates to bullish strategies.
- A double top alerts you to the end of the uptrend.
- A kiss goodbye signals the beginning of bearish trend.
It's all a case of testing resistances and leveraging support, and creating stop exits, which Andy explains in perfect detail.
I swear learning trading has never been easier!
3 - Basic Cash Flow
This is probably my favorite module in the whole course.
There is so much to learn from Andy about cash flow, and he's laying it all out:
- You'll learn strategies for the market going up, down and sideways.
- The difference between investing for capital gains and cash flow.
- Automating decisions so you can trade even when you sleep.
- You'll learn cash flow vocabulary and criteria like a pro.
- Most of all, Andy teaches one of Warren Buffet's favorite techniques.
If this isn't an insane amount of quality topics, I don't know what is.
What's more is that Andy also shows some of his personal trades.
So he can teach you from real experience.
The basic road to financial independence can be found in the equation below:
The cash flow coming in every month has to be higher than your expenses.
It's that simple.
Travel, leisure, family time are all luxuries that you can afford not by hoarding cash in a bank.
All of that is determined by the cash flow you have left over monthly after expenses.
Building a solid cash flow means taking control of your future.
Andy suggests not just tying yourself to the Dow or S&P 500 with your 401(k).
To do so is to put your life in the hands of others.
You want to be actively building towards your controlled success.
Control is fundamental in knowing how you are using your money to make more.
With fundamental and technical analysis, you just read and interpret the data.
You have no control over what you are surveying.
With cash flow and risk management, pillars 3 & 4, you have all the control you need.
You can't choose what the data says, but you can choose what to do with that data.
And the beauty of the stock market is that it is virtually always there for you.
So any moment can be a good moment to make a profit.
When going long, which means you follow an upward movement, there are 5 things to do:
- Evaluate entry point.
- Set a target that is likely to be achieved.
- Plan an exit before you go in.
- Have a clear reward,which is the difference between target and entry price.
- Calculate risk, which is the difference between entry and exit.
The theory is to have two dollars in the target for every dollar in the risk.
Shorting is a bit more abstract to get, but Andy has taught it to thousands of people.
With shorting, you are basically borrowing stocks while they go down.
You then sell x amount of stocks at a higher price than they will be when they go down.
You give the stocks back, and keep the difference in price.
Easy, huh?
4 - Risk Management
So we're at the fourth pillar!
This module will teach you all about:
- Several kinds of common risks you have to know about.
- How to control risk via your laptop.
- Different risk management techniques.
- How diversification can actually be bad for you.
- The links between risk and education.
This module will really teach you to expect the unexpected and deal with it!
Still unsure about what this is all about?
Let's go through some vocabulary!
First, what is non-systemic risk?
This is when certain events affect one stock only, while the rest of the market is good.
This is why most people advocate for diversifying investments, right?
Wrong.
Non-systemic risk is only one of many risks you run while trading.
Diversification does not protect you from systemic risks,though!
Systemic risk is when the whole market goes down altogether.
It's like what happened in the .com bubble burst in 2001 or in the subprime 2008 crash.
There are all kinds of systemic risks.
So how can a beginner manage all these potential risks?
In order to manage risk, you have to stop hoping.
Hoping the stock recovers, hoping you shorted at the right time, etc. etc..
You must focus on what you can control, eliminating hope!
You can control:
- Your cash flow strategy.
- Your insurance policies.
- Your personal fiscal policy.
- Your exit strategy (fundamental!).
- Position size.
- Asset allocation.
- Financial education.
You can't really know when lightning is going to strike, but for everything else, you really need to have as much control as possible.
The Verdict: The Good & The Bad.
To be completely honest, I had a blast going through this course.
Let me answer the questions we had set out to answer at the beginning of this review, in the most direct way possible.
Yes, this course is leagues better than any other beginner's course on investments.
There are some YT videos with Andy's kids explaining concepts like cash flow and risk management.
And they're like 7 and 9.
It's not rocket science, and Andy explains it like he would to his kids.
The course totally delivers what it promises.
After this, you will be able to go trade with much more knowledge packed within you.
Andy Tanner is a Rich Dad author.
I doubt someone as smart as Robert Kiyosaki would hire someone shady.
Andy is definitely not a scam, and he has made countless people financially literate.
Now, when it comes to pricing, this is going to sting a bit.
The whole course sells for $1997, which can be a bit steep for people just starting out hustling.
There is an airtight 30 day money guarantee, though, so if you take the plunge and don't like it, you're still safe.
PROS:
CONS:
If you want to start a trading stocks, and making an income through that, Andy's course is a perfect beginners course.
Buy yourself a copy of his book to see if you like his style and take the plunge.
However, these days I don't really recommend going down the path of trading stocks like Brian is teaching.
Lead Generation, where you rank your own website, is a far superior model to monetize your skills.
Let me explain, keep reading...
Why I Quit Day-Trading... Lead Generation Proved to be a Much Better Biz Model, Here's Why...
I run a $50K per month lead generation business but all of my leads are generating through free traffic or SEO, no risk involved.
It just happens every time
So it's pretty much passive income, I don’t have to worry about the performance of stocks, bonds or anything else.
The website I create ranks on the first page of Google, in the so-called map pack, and the leads just start coming in.
Once my site ranks it generally keeps its rank with very little to no maintenance.
Don’t get me wrong you can still make a living trading on the stock exchange.
Millions of people do it, but it's a hard route and very challenging to do so.
The problem with trading stocks is that you're constantly having to risk manage your portfolio.
Is the stock going up? Is it time to short? Should you diversify?
If things go wrong, it's back to square one, spending more money, trying a different approach.
This is why I still recommend people look into doing lead generation with free traffic
Conclusion
Andy Tanner's 4 Pillars course is well executed, everything is there to learn how trade on the stock market
Let me tell you, there are people that make it work with this kind of method, but the problem is there are many others that really struggle too.
Unlike trading stocks, if you know how to generate leads with free traffic, you can go into any niche and create an incredible level of results for clients.
That’s how 90% of my multiple 6 figure income is generated. And I should add that it's passive income: see free traffic never stops.
In 2021, even during Covid-19, I continue to build more lead gen sites and I write at least 1 blog post a day for this site, because I’ve come to realize that these are the high-income producing activities because it directly increases my free traffic every month.
Click here if you want to know more about my Lead Gen method.
