Phoenix is a strange town, filled with energy and thousands of new homes. The landscape resembles nothing more than a giant beach playground. The colours are grey, beige, and more grey, flat on the topography.

There is one brown hill outside of the town, looking as if it had been left there from some huge construction project.

Here and there golf courses dot the roads; tiny little plots of grass running between clumps of desert scrubs. The signs say ominously: "Do not look for your golf balls under vegetation." Rattlesnakes and other venomous creatures do abide here even though on the surface it appears that the land is devoid of life. The sun, even in winter, burns clear, dry, and intensely hot, except when smog hovers. There is more of that these days than ever as affluent retirees flock here in droves, in spite of the city's drab uniformity.

We are huddled in a large modern lecture hall waiting for the keynote speaker of the AICPA Personal Financial Planning Technical Conference. The atmosphere is decidedly arctic, the rule being in modern hotels, the larger the group of people, the colder the room.

KeyNote Speaker

The lights dim, the trumpeted music blares and onto the stage strides a small, plump, slightly balding man who announces with a lisp to all of us that he is the 'real' Rudy, of the famous movie by the same name. For those who are not American football fanatics, Rudy was allowed to play a few seconds in only one game for Notre Dame University (the Fighting Irish). Get real, you say, but the story is far deeper than that. Rudy Ruettinger is the underdog inspiration for us all. Born to a very poor family in a steel town, he is told from a very young age that he is dumb, slow, cannot do school work, will never amount to much, is not college material, and all of the other cruel labels we place on each other. But Rudy had a dream to go to college - and play football. He worked for four years in the steel mills after scraping through high school, and after witnessing firsthand the death of a dear friend in a steel blaze-out, he walks away from the job, his friends, his family towards his destiny. It is a tremendous struggle against enormous adversity, but he ultimately triumphs. During the course of his studies at Notre Dame, he is diagnosed with severe dyslexia, the reason he could not learn in conventional terms. His drive and motivation are so successful that he has spent his life lecturing, helping, and motivating others like him, and working with disadvantaged children.

Apart from Rudy's inspiring tale, the conference was taken up with workshops, many of which examined the pitfalls of investing, especially a workshop on investment mistakes even smart people make.

Best-selling author, Larry Swedroe, who wrote the book 'Rational Investing in Irrational Times', described some of the entertaining but true mistakes that many of us have made:

Investors are overconfident in their stock picking skills

In fact, even though people believe that the process is hard, they have confidence in their ability to do so. One survey found that 74 percent of investors interviewed expected their funds to consistently outperform the market.

Even if one assumes the law of averages, there isn't a prayer that that many investors will be above average. Given a pool of investors and a Bell Curve, 49 percent will almost always fall below average. Overconfidence is costly. For a 15-year period, the Mensa (people with genius level IQs) Investment Club returned 2.5 percent per year, while the S&P 500 returned 13 percent per year. An investor for 35 years reported that his original investment of $5,300 had grown to $9,300 while the S&P 500 Index produced almost $300,000.

Investors let their egos dominate the process

Active investors need to protect their egos. If the fund beats the benchmark, the investor takes the credit. If the fund under-performs, the manager gets blamed and fired. It is an "I win; I don't lose" game.

Investors do not understand how the price paid impacts returns

Buy high, pay large commissions, get low returns. Buy low, pay low loads or no loads, get high returns.

Investors fall subject to the hot hands mentality

Investors, who chose the top funds based upon the performance of the last 12 months, then switch to the new top funds, earn returns below the average mutual fund consistently.

Investors spend too much time on their investments

They spend an absurd amount of time trying to control the one thing that they can do the least about, which is their raw investment performance. They attempt to pick hot stocks, find star fund managers and guess the market's direction. Yet it is extraordinarily difficult, if not impossible, to do any of these things.

Well, readers, none of these observations will make you feel any better about miserable results. The overwhelming theme of the conference is that investors are unhappy, they need someone to trust and who is experienced enough to help them start again on the road towards financial security.

Self-serving, but overall, in spite of some accounting manipulations, CPA's still have the hearts and minds of most of their clients. Who do you trust with your financial information?

Martha Harris Myron CPA CFPT is a Bermudian, a Certified Financial Planner and VP, Personal Financial Services, Bank of Bermuda. She holds a NASD Series 7 licence, is a former US tax practitioner, and is the winner 2001-The Bermudian Magazine - Best of Bermuda Gold Award for Investment Advice. Confidential Email can be directed to marthamyronnorthrock.bm

The article expresses the opinion of the author alone, and not necessarily that of Bank of Bermuda. Under no circumstances is this advice to be taken as a recommendation to buy or sell investment products or as a promotion for financial plans. The Editor of the Royal Gazette has final right of approval over headlines, content, and length/brevity of article.