The S&P500 has formidable, widely known and well-understood investment benefits. But equally, it has formidable, widely verifiable and highly nuanced investor challenges, many of which are poorly understood. That’s why, on balance, investors are shown to underperform its potential.  

Force500 is designed to enhance investors’ experience with the S&P500. What can often feel undermining and accordingly lead to generally dismal outcomes can — and should be — a much more amenable experience, which should beget significantly more favourable investor outcomes. How so?

Force500 combines superior investment outcomes with an upgraded investor pathway designed to help investors weather the challenges of holding onto their stocks, increasing the likelihood of their holding and thereby the likelihood of yielding better results.

The importance of the investor pathway is not well covered in theory but is obvious in practice. Investments often fail their owners not because of any deficiency in the underlying holding, but because the pathway experience encumbers the investor from achieving success.

By redesigning the pathway — expanding on novel IP developed and successfully implemented over the last several years — Force500 effectively provides investors with costless risk reduction, i.e., reduces the likelihood of a disadvantageous exit or, alternatively, increases the likelihood of an enhanced return without any incremental risk.

The key ingredient is our unique Quantum of Solace system, defined as providing the minimum amount of wellbeing necessary for a relationship — any relationship — to survive. In this framework, the system provides the requisite wellbeing for an investor to successfully survive and maintain a relationship with the S&P500.

Empowering investors with an understandable and active engagement system, Force500 bolsters investor confidence and wellbeing, buoying and thus facilitating investors to achieve a return closer to that of the S&P500 than they otherwise would.

This opportunity presents a breakthrough advance in investor outcomes. After all, empirical evidence shows most investors actually underperform this benchmark annually by about 3 per cent. Their long-term performance is even worse; these percentages only become more dismal over time, with more than 90 per cent of professional investors underperforming over a 20-year horizon.

The S&P500 should provide investors with a compelling investment vehicle. It is the ubiquitous global standard, universally held, spoken and written about, and traded weekdays almost 24/7. Since 1923, the S&P500 (and its predecessors) has generated an annualised total return of approximately 10.5 per cent — which would have grown $1 into more than $13,000 notwithstanding the Great Depression, one World War, oil and inflation crises, and most recently, the global pandemic. One did not even need to hold it for quite so long. From 1960-2021, it grew $10,000 into $4,949,663, providing patient investors with ample returns.

Investment maestro Warren Buffett has repeatedly rhapsodised about the merits of the S&P500, should investors be patient — and resilient — enough to retain their holdings through market upswings, downturns and one (or several) annus horribilis. Buffett has encouraged investors who do not have the time, energy or inclination to study stocks full-time to apply the bulk of their investable dollars into the S&P500. The illustrious Yale University professor Burton Malkiel (renowned for his investment classic ‘A Random Walk Down Wall Street’) has issued the same directives. These have been echoed, too, by noted authority Howard Marks (of Oaktree fame), who has suggested that all equity investors should consider participating in this average as the “main event” — and that any active efforts to improve on it should be seen as “embroidery around the edges”.

So, it has pedigree, proven performance and a host of the world’s most successful investment authorities endorsing its merits.