Diving into financial planning resources or investment strategy tips can feel more like a personality test than a mathematical analysis. You’ll get questions like: Are you active or passive? Do you prefer growth or safety? Do you value short- or long-term rewards?
While these are great things to ask, we’re not here to assign you an investing personality type; we’re introducing an alternative. A new type of investment with a (literally) more tangible way of experiencing investing.
We would certainly give props to Socrates and say that to know thyself is the beginning of investing wisdom, but this is a totally different investment category or “asset class” if you’re feeling fancy. A class that, until recently, has only been available to higher net worth individuals. Let’s call it See, Touch, Feel.
Remember those sensory books when you were a little kid? Or maybe you have a mini-monster roaming your home and you’ve used one of these magical creations to hold their attention. You know, the one with cardboard pages and animal pictures; except instead of a flat image, there’s a 3D tuft of fur sticking out of the bunny’s back.
What’s so magical about these books? Well, for one, as humans we interact with the world around us with all of our senses. We don’t just see. We utilize four other senses to explore and make decisions. It turns out that sensory books, scratch and sniffs and sand boxes are all part of the “See, Touch, Feel” journey. A path to get in touch with our innate abilities, develop those senses, and use them in the world around us.
So what does all this have to do with investing? For most retail investing, aka the stock market, not a lot. After all, most investment decisions are made following a review of information presented on a page or a screen. From there, information is assimilated alongside our experience, and then we make a decision. But what if we could make things a little more human? What if we leveraged the power of place?
This is where local investing comes into view. Investing where you live becomes a way to diversify with the three-dimensional investment decision matrix you call home. Place-based investing may not only increase the amount of available information, but it also increases the types of information.
Welcome to the new world of experiential investing insight. Transparency and information take on a whole new meaning when you are able to see, touch, and feel.