An investment coach is a financial professional who goes beyond typical financial planning and advice to help you identify your investment philosophy, understand your investment strategy, and provide discipline throughout your investment experience. A coach will not only help you identify the right strategy for you, but help you keep your decisions and behavior regarding your investments on track for achieving the results you want.

Free Markets is an ideology where buyers and sellers are allowed to transact freely (i.e. buy/sell/trade) based on a mutual agreement on price without state intervention in the form of taxes, subsidies or regulation. Adam Smith a Scottish economist advocated less government intervention and more market influence in economic related matters amongst people. He wrote a number of influential books during his life that has been credited with providing the foundation of modern economics, including "The Wealth of Nations."

Modern Portfolio Theory which earned the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1990 for the collaborative work of Harry Markowitz, Merton Miller and Myron Scholes. It follows 4 basic rules:

The risk of an individual asset is far less important than the contribution the asset makes to the portfolio’s risk as a whole. For the same amount of risk, diversification can increase returns. The mechanism to reduce risk is dissimilar price movements; therefore, the task is to find assets with low correlations. The Efficient Frontier allows individuals to maximize expected returns for any level of volatility.

A fundamental component of Free Market Investing is the Efficient or Free Market Hypothesis, first explained by Eugene F. Fama in his 1965 doctoral thesis:

"An efficient market is defined as a market where there are large numbers of rational, profit-maximizers actively competing, with each trying to predict future market values of individual securities, and where important current information is almost freely available to all participants. In an efficient market, competition among the many intelligent participants leads to a situation where, at any point in time, actual prices of individual securities already reflect the effects of information based both on events that have already occurred and on events which, as of now, the market expects to take place in the future. In other words, in an efficient market at any point in time the actual price of a security will be a good estimate of its intrinsic value." Eugene F. Fama, "Random Walks in Stock Market Prices," Financial Analysts Journal, September/October 1965.

What Free Market Hypothesis means to you, the investor:

Recognize that the stock market, the media and popular culture, by and large, encourage behavior consistent with the belief that the market is inefficient. Without a clearly defined investment philosophy, it is easy to be manipulated by media, advertisers and investment professionals eager to sell products.

You must understand that there is a choice to be made about how you believe the market works. Do you believe it is efficient or inefficient?

Your market belief will guide your investment strategy.

The investors' dilemma is a cycle that explains why many investment decisions are driven by emotional and psychological bias consistent with investors' values and goals. On the one hand, investors want assets to grow to an ideal state – to have enough wealth accumulated to meet personal financial goals. Yet, for most, this will only happen by investing money prudently. Therefore, investors need to make decisions and select strategies to maximize investments year after year. Unfortunately, the actions investors frequently take are likely to be self-defeating. Let's look at how each step of this counterproductive cycle interferes with an investor's ability to develop and maintain an ideal investment strategy.