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If you really must know our trade secrets...well then...okay. First of all, this is dedicated to my friends and family, who knowingly or probably unknowingly, have helped shape this trade secret investing recipe. It was written in a style to delight these folks...but it is all true. So here it goes...Enjoy!

Growing up on a farm in Ohio I watched my dad, Lester, do a lot of hands on business deals. As a farmer you negotiate every day for everything you buy or sell. He had an eighth grade education, but he really knew how to work numbers! Also as a farmer, if you do not understand several key Agricultural Macro Value Cycles, you will likely be out of business. My dad had a pretty rough early life. His experiences in the depression shaped his life and personal values. During the depression, his parents lost their family farm and my dad lost his wife, the mother of his five children. One of his motos was "it's not so much what happens to you in life, but it's how you react to it that will make the difference".

My dad insisted that I go to college. I knew he was serious when he gifted me $6,000 for the tuition money, as a junior in high school. It was late in college and I was majoring in finance, when he and I started investing in stocks together. He believed that to get ahead financially you had to be willing to take some risks. We were 50/50, I did the investing and he provided me with my 50% of the money in the form of a personal loan. On the first investment ($8,000) in 1966 we lost everything. Better said, I lost everything! It was a computer stock and I'm telling you it just disappeared. I finally got the nerve to call and tell him. His measured response was, "I guess if you can stand it, I can stand it".

Out of college, my first job was near my Uncle Carl's home. He lived in Iowa. At age 65, he retired from the insurance and banking business, he became my investing mentor. He taught me about investing. He also shared some principals about the risk of working for a large corporation. He said you should be financially secure by the age of 40, and financially independent by the age of 50 (whatever that means to someone at the age of 24). Uncle Carl believed that growing money by investing could have more impact on your net worth than your career salary earnings. He said my net worth target at retirement should be equal to the sum of all my career earnings. I thought he was crazy!

Those were tough times for most investors. I was repaying my losses to dad, and then I lost even more. The best I can say about my investing in the late 1960s and early 1970s, was that I was undefeated in the game of Monopoly. But I was persistent and continued to learn. By age 35, I had paid cash for our $138,000 house in St. Louis, Missouri and also had put away $17,500 for each of my three kids' college educations.

With my professional career, we moved around a lot, working with different people, different customers, different markets, and different cultures. We lived in Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Minnesota, Missouri, Singapore, Missouri, and then retired in Colorado. I had some great business mentors and customers teach me people coaching, customer relations, strategic thinking, and global business management. We learned again and again that knowing the Macro Cycles and major market trends were the critical elements to success in business. Just like on the farm, things my dad had taught me.

Near the peak of my career, at the age of 50 I had a heart attack and retired. This is when I learned just how valuable the teachings of my dad and Uncle Carl were. Being financially independent at age 50, gave me choices. I could retire from an intense work environment to focus on another key life element...my health. By the way my net worth, at retirement, was more than 2 times my career salary earnings. Way to go Uncle Carl!

With my mind still intact, what could I do with the rest of my life? In time, I developed a list of things I had done well and would love to do in the future. In 1996, since it was the information age, I decided to try to improve on Uncle Carl's investment recipe. Also, I started using my people management skills to coach people to successfully grow money. They were like sponges, all wanting to learn more. I learned that few had any knowledge of the key financial principles. We found that, basic financial knowledge is not taught in high schools in the United States. We concluded that unless you studied finance in college or you have an Investing Mentor, chances are you may never learn the critical investing principles to grow money. Also, we learned the importance of having been taught a solid value system dealing with the reasonable management of money.

From 1996 until 2000, we developed the improved investment recipe, for the benefit of our family. At the time we had no thoughts of creating a business. Somewhere in this time period we started sharing the new recipe with our friends, primarily for their feedback. Our friends said..."what a business opportunity!" So here we are, starting a family business. We have proven investing experience, upgraded over 35 years, combined with 30 years of global business management skills. And there is a big opportunity because there are a lot of less experienced investors to share our knowledge and experience with.

During 2001 to 2002, the excitement for a business opportunity began to build. We adapted our new investing recipe to models based on mathematical calculations, that would reflect changes in investing risk levels. The risk these decision models measure are based on changes in key macro economic factors. These factors are unfortunately like moving targets, but the models seem to keep up. After the Macro portion of the investing process, we use a couple of models to monitor changes in Sector and Style valuations. Then there are these nifty models that signal changes in market direction. We have given this model a name, we call it the Market Cycle Timer. Then finally, we have this other most amazing model that signals when to buy "on sale". Or would you believe, even when to sell! In all cases each of these decision models are backed up by confirmation decision models. We did this to improve our desicion making consistency and to help insure our long term integrity.

In the beginning it seemed that few understood the decision model output, let alone the decision confirmation model's output. When we demonstrated this to our friends, they were impressed and also confused. Inevitably, they would ask us to just manage their money for them. No way we said, if we were going to help educate the masses and really make a difference, then we must simplify everything and teach all who would be interested. So we then focused directly on what a common man, a common woman, or even their common child could reasonably understand. And also, what would any of them possibly ever be receptive to buy? The resulting overly enriched knowledge, then became tasty condensed information, translated into common sense language with actionable suggestions, void of emotion, all for your personal delight and available consumption on our website.

We wished we could just share Uncle Carl's improved Neff Family investing recipe, raising the level of investing success for those less experienced. So they could become as fortunate as us. We have read that there are 50 million "401k type" of individuals, often small accounts. Wow, if we could just get several million of these folks to pay us a few dollars a month for our information, that is more than tons of money. We don't really need all this additional money, but imagine the possibilities if 50 million people learn to successfully invest. Then in return they helped teach their 100 million children how to grow money. Amazing!

We have done the research, we are up the learning curve and plan to begin our marketing. A share of the excess profits will go to our Neff Education Financial Foundation for Youth (NEFFY). The foundation plans are to help teach future generations of less experienced people how to grow money.

It's all true...can you imagine how much effort this took? What an opportunity...what a dream...what a country!