Chess Grandmaster and CFP Team Up to Achieve Clients’ Endgame

OCTOBER 21, 2014
Chess Grandmaster and CFP Team Up to Achieve Clients’ Endgame
New book takes strategic approach to winning at investing

“Rich as a King” applies chess strategies to personal finance.

You don’t need to have a Ph.D in economics to be a successful investor, but even a Nobel Prize winner in economics can appreciate the value of viewing investing through the decision-making paradigms of a champion chess player.

Indeed, Nobel Prize laureate in economics, Michael Spence, is just one of a long list of distinguished endorsers of Rich as a King: How the Wisdom of Chess Can Make You a Grandmaster of Investing, already an investment bestseller today, its first day of publication (by Morgan James Publishing).

Co-written by chess grandmaster Susan Polgar and financial advisor Douglas Goldstein, the book takes the reader outside the sometimes alienating or confusing world of stocks and bonds to the excitement of the chessboard to get a more objective view of how to strategically win the game at investing.

As behavioral finance expert Meir Statman says in his endorsement (disclosure: this author is also an endorser) of the book, “We do not see the rivals on the other side of our trades, blind to the likelihood that we are the losers. But we see the rivals on the other side of our chessboards, forcing us to ask whether we are likely to be the losers.”

That point was brought home to Goldstein, an international advisor catering to U.S. and Israel-based clients from his firm’s Jerusalem headquarters, when playing against his child’s chess coach (two of Goldstein’s children were chess champions in Israel, a country that ranks high in international competitions).

“In a post-mortem on a game, [the coach] asked me ‘why didn’t you move your bishop?’ and I said I had another idea of what I was trying to accomplish,” he tells ThinkAdvisor in a phone interview.

After another losing game, the coach (who trained a World Championship contender, among others), said “my bishop was still in a bad place; why didn’t I move it?” Goldstein recalls.

“It was then that I realized that the exact same excuses I gave to my chess coach were the same ones my clients gave to me when I asked why they don’t make changes in portfolios that are underperforming. I saw exact parallels to the world of personal planning.”

Goldstein was not alone. Harvard economist Ken Rogoff (of Rogoff and Reinhart fame), himself a chess grandmaster, noted in his endorsement of the book that “chess players who know little about investing, and investors who know little about chess, will gain fresh insights into both.”

Full article here.