The PSE is being hacked by "Market Hackers" and YOU are one of them!

So if you've read my previous blogs on the matter, you should have known by now that while we do play the market, we believe that is a RIGGED GAME. This is something we would want you to have an open mind about and discover for yourself. Just like in any computer system, there are black-hat hackers trying to profit out of the misery of others. However, there are also white-hat hackers who expose the deed and traps being set. They equip people with technologies and techniques to discover these using charts and market research. We would be glad if you'd be part of the ethical white-hats who make it more profitable and stable for everyone than black-hats who hype the market using fake accounts, fake groups, fake news as these fake gurus hide in a shroud of anonymity. 

Being a trader (which I shall call Market Hacker for this subject) is not easy, you need to know the ins and outs of the system and you can never become one (Black or White) if you blind yourself from the reality (that there is a battle going on with Traders vs. Traders and worst... Humans vs. Machines). Add the fact that both sides are now use trading bots with powerful connections to the market (high frequency trading), they can pump and dump the market on opening and last price to confuse any trader whether trading for the shorter or longer term.

I would recommend first that you read my previous blogs (although not necessary for this topic)

• Why and How the market is rigged
  
• Why the market does not follow "fundamentals"
  

What is a system and what is it "not to hack"?

A system, just like your operating system, a computer game, business process, etc. runs on rules! example is a rule in society that says "No Jaywalking". In a world where everybody follows the rules, it is so much fun right? wrong! because turns out someone got ahead of other people by jaywalking! they got around 20% faster and became more productive as a result. they got the promotions for being always ahead of others and not sweat staying in the sun's direction. Upon learning the technique, the law-abiding population at a rate of 10% per day switched to becoming violators as the risk-reward becomes more enticing. 

Have you played a new game that just got released for P3,000 and is now available on steam? oh you got yours for P200 only in Divisoria? complete with cheat codes? Awesome! you are also a hacker because you just hacked thru the system wherein a good citizen is expected to buy original products which supports the developer's hard work. Yet, you did not and even proudly explain "What idiot would pay these stupid developers for something they work hard for years" right? 

So! who has never violated a rule or two raise your hand! :D obviously none... Here is the simplest way to define a hacker in the terms of a System Engineer like myself... Whenever you bypass and violate a system's rules for how it is normally expected to work, you are already hacking and exploiting weaknesses in the system!

The Stock Market's System

It has a very simple purpose... to trade shares of companies whose worth is based on its fundamentals. If a company's Assets are growing, its share value grows with it! if the Assets are declining and business is dying, its prices obviously fall (at a well formulated price). This is because the stock prices have a simple formula of how the company is performing (growth rate, earnings, etc.). The rule is you use the fundamentals to see if one is overpriced or cheap, has potential growth or declining, has sound leadership or corrupted, and so on. and with that, The rule is "Invest on good companies and sell the bad ones based on their financial scorecards". With fundamentals, the market is sensible and more predictable. 

But something happened along the way such that fundamentalists are being killed by the increasing breed of "violators". The lazy generation and the availability of stock trading has given the rise to "Stock Trading" and when I say trading I mean it. You are not an investor, but a merchant who buys low and sells high based off market demand. But that is not where the true hacking is of course! Eventually everyone has to buy something and sell something when the time is right. Market hackers however aim for compounding their wins by following trend cycles. As cycles happen every day, week or month, market hackers have their eyes fixed on the monitors (or bots) and are ready to trigger on their signals.

This is why the market becomes more and more volatile as the number of traders increase who uses different techniques outwitting each other. 

Traders are not limited to people who work on a job and trade the markets which are the majority. But you should never worry about those guys, those are C-class Market Hackers. What you need to worry are the big guns. There are bigger hackers at play like the NEWS Media outlets, The brokers (who knows or controls your orders and can use the volume to manipulate the market), The Guru's and Experts who profit more on the advice than their stock trades and of course the Companies themselves who are free to do insider trading with no repercussion (specially in the Philippines). So if you have not read that article yet, please click here.

Know your enemy's disaster level

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”
― Sun Tzu, The Art of War

• Wolf (Outsiders like you and me)
• Tiger (Gurus, Fake news propagator, Fake trading group admins)
• Demon (App and Platform owners, they monitor and learn your trades along with others and can use them for their advantage.Worst the apps could have viruses on them)
• Dragon - (Big Companies doing insider trading and uses their media extension to cause market turbulence) 
• God - (Big Financial Institutions who can pump volume in a market)

 

ASTRA aims to help White Hat Hackers

So then why is ASTRA reading trends and much like similar market tools made available, rely on trends and not fundamentals. Well, because ASTRA believes this is the "new normal". It is not that fundamentals are totally dead! that is for us to utilize and it is used to support your stand on your investment! ASTRA is just focused on trade behavior analysis and shares it to us so we can get a sense on how the market is trending. It believes the market is rigged because it aims to learn, visualize and expose incidents of potential market manipulation so others can avoid these traps. 

We who are part of developing it are also victims of these traps before and this is why we made ASTRA to help others learn and avoid them in the future. We share this freely as it may help you guys in your trading journey. Whether it helps you or not, remember that "In stocks you should never blame anyone or anything! because at the end of the day, it is you who pulled the trigger"

Why and how the PSE is rigged

Like I said, the Philippine Stocks Exchange is rigged. We have companies that do not file accurate financial statements (as they add a lot of accounting magic to them). Most are more involved in political activities than business, have cases of AMLA, links with shady organizations and violations where no one gets punished at all. But this is not the worst part. The worst is that these companies also play the market, something not allowed in 1st world countries that lands people in jail and companies being penalized in billion to total shut down. So lets break down how the big companies manipulate the market and how they victimize traders and investors.

NEWS

This is already a given to most. An entity that promises to provide unbiased and up to date report on what is happening in the country or across the globe. Led by people of "high integrity" and is not affiliated with anyone nor protects anyone. Just pure integrity news source right? This is the biggest joke people still believe in. The NEWS Network just like any other programs rely on funding to operate. There is no such thing as charity and everything has a price. The NEWS networks are funded thru Advertisements, Sponsors (even foreign states) and business interest groups. If you are the news network and you are to be paid millions not to air a report exposing and damaging a company, rather they want you to promote them, then that will be the NEWS. This is how they turn victims into villains and the perpetrators into heroes. There is a saying that if the NEWS is spreading bad news, be on the hunt for opportunities. If they keep spreading good news, be on the lookout for dangers ahead.

Brokerage Firms

These are companies who provide platforms for people to trade their stocks which is great. Popular ones include FirstMetroSec and ColFinancial.  But you have to understand, having such control also means they would have an edge playing the markets. They can see thru trades being planned before and after market hours. They can time the market with ease compared to the average traders. The worst though which most traders and investors will encounter are intentional slowdowns and inaccessibility. If you have been trading for quite some time, you would encounter sudden slow downs where you either take so long to submit an order and unable to buy or sell on time, or you just cannot log-in at all. These are not one-offs and the local brokerages make different alibis and excuses but never fix them. Why fix something that is actually a feature than an issue right? because I tell you, this feature they have has existed since I started using them in 2007! Notice whenever this happens, the market drops, this is their way of "Shaking off the people"

Fake News, Fake Groups and Fake Accounts

This is similar to NEWS above but is more malicious. If you imagine them to be like some alien parasites, its their way of "blending in the crowd" and pretend to be down to earth. act like a human, talk like a human, mingle with humans, then talk about opportunities in their space. The Media uses it and Big corporations to get market sentiments and also stealing private data in a blanket wrap they call "know your customers" of KYC. Fake accounts have become so important as well nowadays as they use them to generate fake likes (illusion that something is popular) and fake reviews (to spam comment sections with comments praising or destroying specific people, group, company or product).

Insider Trading

If you know someone on the inside, that would be great. This is because whether you like it or not, the market is definitely rigged from the inside. If companies play their stocks, then any trader or investor who are outsiders have already lost. It is the same as gambling with someone who has arranged the order of the cards. This is why one of the key decision factor of fundamental investors is to know which people are in the executives and board. A company with unethical and cunning leadership is not worth investing with. all they will be focusing is hyping and crashing the company's stocks while they reap people off. If the company is losing sales and not growing, but grows has lots of stock market activities, then products and services is not on their priority list nor is it their main source of income. Notice that no one has ever and can ever be punished for such in the Philippines.

Accounting Magic

Knowing how much window washing is done by companies in the country is enough for me to say "fundamentals" are "technically" dead. I would be happy to invest for example on RCBC and BLOOM (Solaire) due to how much they stole from the Bangladesh bank (Money laundering). However I believe such "profits" will not add to their Financial Reports for the benefit of the investors and are pocketed by the several people for the job well done. Like that, same to what I just said, no one actually gets punished in the Philippines so corrupt behavior is an acceptable norm.

My two cents

This is not to make you spooked from investing or trading in the PSE. But some things you need to be aware of than walk around it blindly. There may be other issues you have encountered that is not listed here but these are most of the major issues we see about the Philippine business environment that makes it one of the most dynamic and dangerous to put your money into. Until the government enforces the law correctly, the Philippines (and of course Filipinos as a whole) will be seen as one of the most corrupt, emotional and unpredictable in comparison with its neighboring countries who are stepping up and surpassing us in almost everything.

ASTRA Reports: Average Trade Value

The ASTRA System provides a report called the Average Trade Value (see here) which ranks the stocks with the highest 5-Day Price-X Moving Average. This enables us to dilute those stocks that are being hyped for a day or week only to mess unaware investors and traders. There are two versions of this report. The Top 100 (ordered highest to lowest) which are stocks ASTRA wants you to focus on, and the Bottom 100 (ordered lowest to highest) which ASTRA recommends you to avoid. This report is all about trend and by trend, we mean not just by volume but by overall trade value.

Volume vs. Value

So why do we say value? well simply put, in stocks, value means more than volume. You can tell me you bought a thousand shares of stock X for 10 Pesos and sold it twice the amount and earned you another 10 thousand pesos. I on the other hand bought 100 shares only of Stock Y costing 1000 pesos and sold it also for twice the amount. it gave me 100,000 more. so who earned more or made more noise that day? me because I made more value. The same in stocks, a penny stock stating it made billions of volume traded the day means nothing as it will not impact the PSEI unlike the big transaction value makers. and the more transactions they produce, the more popular they are.

Form your Basketball Team

I love explaining things as a game! Everything to me is some form of game that has rules, players (actors), rewards and punishments. So I will explain the game play in the most relatable game to us Filipinos... BASKETBALL! So! you own a basketball team and you need at least 5 players to handle different positions. You will also need some bench players in case they are tired or retiring. You will also need to draft some new candidates who will join your team.

Mission:

• Form a portfolio of 5-10 stocks
• The main 5 active stocks should always be unique. This diversifies your portfolio in case a specific industry you focused into fails.
  
• Unlike real basketball, your bench players are not inactive. Let's just say they are "training" or being warmed up. These are stocks not in the buy and hold but more of those sleeping "potential stars". If they go down, usually you use Double Down Cost Averaging
• Draft 5 stocks that are not part of your portfolio and monitor them. When they are ready, replace an aging, declining or dead stock in your portfolio.
• Do not exceed 10 stocks, you cannot monitor them all or trade fast enough when you see all become bearish at once. This will cause you to panic specially with the crappy services most of our trading platform offers (see here for my take on the PRO's and CON's of the 2 platforms I use as well)

You can choose your best stocks from the Top 100 list. I do not recommend anything beyond that specially the Bottom 100 List. But if risk is your play style and you have more tools in your arsenal that gives you that edge then go for it! Me however, I am highly concerned into trends and thus even limit my draft picks to the top 20 only. This means I tend to miss out potential 1-day 30% growth or double your money events from more volatile and emotional stocks. however it protects me from those "lose half your investments in a day" kind of stocks as well.

Caveat: You can have zero active stocks as well. specially in bear markets. It's up to you if you do not follow the rule of having your 5 to be unique. You can have 2 forwards, 3 point guards at the same time... I mean 2 logistics and 3 banking stocks  at the same time but note you open yourself to risk if the industry overall falls together.

Why you should not be selling at just +1.5% gain

If you are a new trader in the PSE, please know that transactions (Buying or Selling) are not free. It has charges that you can consider as "sunk costs" and that also means, when a stock value goes down and you decided to cut losses, you do not only lose the difference but also lose money on the transaction itself.

The common charges apply for your all buy and sell transactions

Fee Type	Amount	Remarks	Value at PHP10,000
Commission	0.25%	of the gross trade amount	25.00
Value Added Tax (VAT)	12%	of commission	3.00
PSE Trans Fee	0.005%	of the gross trade amount	0.50
SCCP Fee	0.01%	of the gross trade amount	1.00
TOTAL	0.295%	of the gross trade amount	29.50

Selling adds another fe called the Sales Tax

Fee Type	Amount	Remarks	Value at PHP10,000
Sales Tax	0.6%	of the gross trade amount	60.00

To ensure that you earn money from your trade, your break even price is 1.21% of your capital (without any buy or sell transaction charges). Until you reach this amount, you are earning almost nothing.

Battle of the Stock Trading Platforms (Feature breakdown of COLFINANCIAL and FIRSTMETROSEC)

I have only used 2 stock trading platform so far and never tried any other new ones since 2006. If given the chance I will try the rest but so far,, I will share to you the PRO's and Con's of these two and why I would recommend one over the other.

Feature	First Metro Securities	Col Financial
Off-market orders	Allows you to set GTD, GTW and GTM orders which just mean Good till day, week or month. Because of this, you can perform stop losses and buy-in strategies that trigger when the time price hits your thresholds. WIN	None. It is very limitted in this feature and only allows you to trade on market hours. This disables you from catching open hour prices and also positioning your stop losses. LOSE
Multiple Tabs	Allows multiple tab sessions thus making it easier to navigate between trades and screens without needing to refresh the page each time. This lessens back and forth and trade delays because you need to go back and look at your portfolio at the same time when buying a share of stock 1 and sell stock 2. WIN	Does not allow multiple tabs. you are stuck on one screen and thus if you need to sell and check a new stock, you will have to do them in a linear fashion. if their site slows down to respond 10 seconds per page, you would have lost 20 seconds trade time when you want to confirm password and then by that time, you are too late and noticed the prices have changed. LOSE
Stock Quote view	Allows you to see the Top 10 BIDS and ASKS.This helps you see where the support and resistance levels for the day are located WIN	Only allows you to see the Top 5 BIDS and ASKS thus limiting your view. LOSE
Technical Analytics	Shows several analytics on its analytics tabs but I find it misleading (i.e. RSI). It will say a stock is BULLISH when in our analysis the trend is dying. not sure how they were computed but I cannot trust it's analysis. LOSE	It provides technical based recommendations in its [Research->Technical->Technical Guide] menu. It will provide you the action to take on all stocks which seem to be on par with our trend recommendation system. WIN
Charts	Their charts are ugly as hell as they slapped everything in a limitted screen full of scrollbars. LOSE	Has a more simplistic intra-day chart which can relate for day-traders WIN
Trade Monitoring	Allows you to make a bucket list of stocks you are interested in and monitor these. (Quotes->Multiple Bids)  WIN (because of multitab)	Also allows you to monitor these on Quotes tab under six-pack and watch-list. However because you need to navigate in and out of these each time when you want to perform a different action, your experience will be so annoying and will cripple your ability to time the market. LOSE
Other Investments	There seems to be nothing else that can be bought here other than stocks LOSE	Allows purchasing mutual funds (if that is your thing). WIN

Conclusion

First Metro Securities with the first 3 critical features make it obvious win. The rest of the feature do not add up to beat this. As long as COLFINANCIAL does not allow multi-tabs forcing their users to be limited in their movements, and also not enabling them to make scheduled trades and wider view of the market BIDS and ASKS, users of their platform will miss out on what First Metro Securities offers. Note these are my opinions only so you may have a different experience or tools of preference. If you know something that is better than these 2 please feel free to suggest in the comments bellow. Thanks :)

Double Down on Cost Averaging

Just do cost averaging they say... you won't lose they say... you will be rich one day if you do it constantly they say... but when I checked my result after years of cost averaging... WHY IS MY PERFORMANCE AVERAGE? This is another common advice given to newbies. While it does work, it reduces your potential gains. It ensures one thing... "your gains are average as well". So for those who do not know yet, Cost Averaging is setting  a discipline of buying on certain days (ex: your payday) on particular stocks religiously. This is not bad for people who are not truly active or want to really mess with market fluctuations and market timings.

The chart below will show 6 months worth of trends from month #0 and assume they sold their shares on month 6 (July Peak).

MONTH	NEW SHARES	PRICE	TOTAL COST	TOTAL SHARES	TOTAL COST	TOTAL PORT VALUE PRICExSHARES
JAN	100	50	5000	100	5000	5,000
FEB	100	45	4500	200	9500	9,000
MAR	100	40	4000	300	13500	12,000
APR	100	45	4500	400	18000	18,000
MAY	100	50	5000	500	23000	25,000
JUNE	100	55	5500	600	28500	33,000
JULY	0	60		600	28500	36,000 SOLD

So you see, using such method, you get a somewhat average gain of 7,500 pesos if you decided to sell on July(at 60 pesos)... It is not that bad, however you could've increased the earnings rate further by not buying into the bull and have focused while the market is lower.

 A better use of cost averaging which I use is what I call "Double Down Cost Averaging" to start cost averaging on stocks you know to have potential upswing but are hammered. For example, buying into a stock that seems to be losing downtrend momentum and about to go up. Did It fell off by 10-15% or more in value?  Instead of exiting, inject double of the original stake. You can see this in your COL or FMS accounts as % change. Then once it starts kicking up, STOP your cost averaging... 

Lets say the market happened similar to the previous sample. on Feb and Mar, the stock was still being hammered. so instead of buying the normal 100 per month, double down. I buy if I entered and the market is still falling but if its rising, I do not dilute my potential gains and would rather focus the money on a different prospect.

MONTH	NEW  SHARES	PRICE	TOTAL COST	TOTAL SHARES	TOTAL COST	TOTAL PORT VALUE PRICExSHARES
JAN	100	50	5000	100	5,000	5,000
FEB	200	45	9000	300	14,000	13,500
MAR	400	40	16000	700	30,000	28,000
APR	0	45	0	700	30,000	31,500
MAY	0	50	0	700	30,000	35,000
JUNE	0	55	0	700	30,000	38,500
JULY	0	60		700	30,000	42,000 SOLD

So if you decided to sell on July, you will earn 12,000 pesos compared to above (60% more). I am not saying this always works though and its just how I play. Also if the stock you are playing is wrong, then you have just amplified your loss. So the goal of this strategy is that once it is green and continues to go up, the only concern on your mind should be exit strategies (where and when to put your sell positions).

Mutual Funds and VUL (Insurance).. are they better than personally doing stocks?

New investors (young and old) are often easy targets of scheming sales people. And when I say "salespeople", those who hide under the guise of "investors", "financial advisors" and "gurus" but are actually "sacrificing" their time more on hunting for someone like you (so that you will become rich and smart just like them?). Strange... very strange...

I am not saying everyone as there are several honest and good willed people out there. But I will arm you to be defensive and cautious as I have seen a lot of these snake-oil salesmen misrepresenting their products for the sake of getting sales more than wanting you to truly understand their products and see if it fits your needs. These products have their own PROs and CONs but most of the time, it limits your opportunities because these products feed on your potential gains more than they can amplify.

Mutual Funds 

Lets say you do not want to bother trading stocks everyday. you find it hectic and you don't care of learning it. You want to put your money in and let it just grow by itself. If the market is falling, then it will just balance itself out and on average, it should average at 12% Well then this is probably for you might say but NO! first do not be fooled when the show you some BS chart and idea that the stock market on average returns 10-12%. That is old recycled sales talk as now it moves around 6-8%. It changes with the times. Most mutual funds also are just eating your money and you are better off trading on the PSE index! trust me! if you expect them to trade on your best interest you are fooling yourself. 

On average they are just pretty much blind traders putting in money on an index or a portfolio mix and let it ride for life. when a bear market happens you will see that their units follow suit. Wait? did they not exit the market before it happened? I thought they are "experts"??? what are those monthly "professional fees" I pay them for then? Pretty sure they did, they will just show you what the market is doing and say "Oh... the market went sour so the value of units went down". but highly likely they have "shorted" these already (sold at high price and aim to buy later). 

So if your mutual fund just follows the market, you know its a sham and its like me taking 2% cut of your potential earnings if you had just invested blindly in the PSE index. If a mutual fund "expert" shows you their performance chart and they just follow the market (PSEI), leave! because he is just basically putting your money on the index and sleep. All that while charging you thousands a month on "professional fee". You should only pay professional fees on true traders who beat the market, those who can sell before the crash and buy before the boom which makes your investment grow continuously, thus beating the market for more than what he charges. 

VUL (Variable Unit Link Insurance) 

This is a very common offer in the insurance industry. Insurance is good if you have beneficiaries, but if you don't have one why are you buying these for? Insurance is like a lottery where you hope that you can die today so you or your family will become rich for a fraction of that "investment". This is something you renew and pay every year until the day they claim you are no longer insurable. That time the relationship is like "Thanks for your years of paying us for nothing... but at least you should be happy because turns out you are rewarded with a longer life than the average :)".

Now what is VUL. They may sell you this product under a different name (VLL, HoneyPot, Pikachuchu or Wachamacallit) but as long as you see "insurance" + "investment" or "pay periodically until X years" and they claim "you will no longer need to pay insurance after that" then chances are its a VUL. A VUL is basically a product sold as one but is actually two products. An "Insurance" and a "Mutual Fund". 

Amazing so I have a mutual fund that also gives me free insurance after 10 years? or was it an insurance that I paid in advanced that gives me free mutual fund units? Close but you gotta remove the free part most of these "salesmen" try to hide from you. Nothing is free coz if it was, the insurance industry would not had become one of the richest businesses specially in fear driven economies. Now with that said, as it has a mutual fund portion, that means the same rules apply. What agents will not tell you unless you ask is that they will eat your fund using the "professional fee" for their in-house expert who is just as good as falling along with the index. if the market crashes, so will their units. No hedge strategy? no cut-loss? Nope! just pure incompetence from "financial experts" who fare worst than average traders.

The reality is that you are buying 2 things at the same time for X years. an insurance and a mutual fund. let me give you a sample. lets simplify and say you only need 5 years of paying 5k a month or 60K a year. lets also assume the market grows at a constant rate of 6%  annually for its previous value. Do not believe their sales talk by the way that the market grows at 10-12% on average. You are not talking to investors but sales people living off on selling products. They do not know what they are saying except for the sales pitch they recycle. The average is 6-8% and it changes depending on several factors. But they will claim 10-12 is average when its not because most buyers who get lured only get to learn this after they decided to claim and complain (or not because yes! they freaking DEAD!) :D

The chart below shows that your annual payments get split into 2 pools. Insurance and the "investment". The first years would be higher because usually they use it as payment for the premium of the insurance. It gradually decreases until after 5 years, congrats! you no longer need to pay it! But wait??? why did you put some deductions for the succeeding years and who is paying for that? Some will claim "oh! its the company who is now paying for the insurance"... wow! how nice of them right? nope!

YEAR	ANNUAL	Insurance Payment	New  Mutual Fund Investment	Total MF Unit Value	Unit growth @6%
1	60k	40K	20K	20K	1,200
2	60k	20K	40K	61,200	3,672
3	60k	10K	50K	107,570.86‬	3,672
4	60k	5K	55K	169,025.11	6,454.25
5	60k	5K	55K	234,166.62	10,141.51
6	0	5K	0	239,308.13	14,358.49
7	0	10K	0	243,666.62	14,620.00
8	0	10K	0	248,286.62	14,897.20
9	0	20K	0	243,183.82	14,591.03
10	0	20K	0	237,774.85	14,266.50

If you do the math you will see that it actually "leeches" of your mutual fund account. Imagine having a bank account with an interest rate of 6% (Nice!) but then there is this auto-debit account from your gym membership that can control their monthly fee and just keep raising it each year? 

This is how the scheme works and is where people who claimed the insurance get shocked that after X years have passed, they discovered that they paid more than what they will receive which is too different from the sales pitch given. because unlike normal insurance, only you have access to your bank account and can decide if you will still get an insurance for the year or just accept nature and not bother with it. A VUL however means that the insurance company has access to a "bank account" which you had with them and can eat into its fund value by forcing the insurance portion to auto pay premium priced insurance annually, specially if when you are older. Notice in the exaggerated sample, the value of the fund, even with the constant growth of 6%, can no longer sustain the insurance feeding off of it. Year 9 and 10, the value is decreasing and with that, the 6% growth value. This is how the insurance makes money. But you won't need to worry about that much because by the time you realized it... you DEAD man! :D

Conclusion

If you are young and is starting to learn investment, play the stock market. Get some bruises and lose some! That is what investors call "tuition fee". what you will learn will be better than what you pay monthly to a mutual fund trader. If you are however not in any way interested in learning and bother with stocks and would prefer finding someone who will trade your money seriously. Find a good mutual fund trader like me (joke!). You need to find a serious investment firm that has a track record of beating the market and not listen to salesmen who do not even buy or use their own product.

If insurance is already something truly desire, then the VUL is better than plain insurance as it enforces you to pay now for something that you might not be able to in the future. A security for your loved ones left behind. Also note that it is harder for your dependents to claim your stock portfolio (when you suddenly blink out of existence). Stock brokerages do not have an option for you to specify who will claim your shares and thus, once you are gone, it is basically theirs... and thus, that is where the insurance becomes quite a bit useful.