Welcome to the Web site of the National Association of Online Investors (NAOI). Here you will learn how we are empowering individuals to enter the market with confidence, with success and without fear. Plus we are working with investment advisors and financial organizations to show them how to gain a massive competitive advantage by offering investment products, investing methods and wealth solutions that better meet the wants and needs of the investing public.

Listed below on this page are the “Five Pillars of Investor Empowerment” that will enable investors to take full advantage of the profit potential of equity markets. These same factors will also enable investment advisors and financial organizations to uncover a massive amount of revenue potential that is now lying dormant due to the way investing works today.

An Introduction to the NAOI

Founded in 1997, the NAOI’s is currently the market’s premier provider of comprehensive, objective and actionable investor education to the public. Thousands of individuals have taken our online courses, read our books and/or attended our college classes.

However, based on 20+ years of interacting with current and potential investors, we realized that more than education is needed to enable individuals to invest with confidence and success. To meet this goal we defined and incorporated into our offerings the “Five Pillars of Investor Empowerment” discussed below on this page - only one of which is education.

Introductions

Hello, my name Leland Hevner, President and CEO of the National Association of Online Investors (NAOI) an organization that I founded in 1997 to teach individuals how investing works and to show them how to create wealth by participating in equity markets.

As we teach people how to invest, they also teach us. We learn from our students how they view the world of investing, how they make investing decisions and what they want / need from the financial services industry in order to enter the market with confidence. This is information we use to constantly update and enhance our education course content. We also share this information with financial advisors and organizations to enable them to create investing products and wealth solutions that better meet the needs of the investing public.

The Organization Chart and the Evolution of the NAOI

The diagram below shows the current organization chart of the NAOI. It has grown and evolved over the course of the past 20+ years to meet the goals of our Mission Statement as stated above. We have come a long way from offering a simple personal investing course in 1997.

The purpose of each Division is discussed in detail at this link.

The Five Pillars of Investor Empowerment

As mentioned at the top of this page, the NAOI was founded in 1997 with the mission of teaching individuals how to invest. And for over two decades we did quite well, eventually becoming the market’s premier provider of comprehensive, objective and actionable investor education.

The NAOI Education Division

A major problem with investing today is that nowhere in academia, at any level, have individuals been taught even the basics of how to successfully participate in equity markets. Therefore, most people see little option but to entrust their financial futures to investment advisors, who are also salespeople, and hope for the best.

The NAOI addresses this problem by offering to the public comprehensive, objective and actionable investing education. The “NAOI Individual Investor Certification Program” that includes the courses pictured below, is the gold standard for investor education today. For more information related to NAOI education go to this link.

While not all individual investors need the level of education provided by the above Certification Program, any advisor or financial organization that offers at least a basic investor education resource, customized by the NAOI to highlight the use of their products, will gain a massive competitive advantage in today’s market. More information is found at this link.

The Investor-Market Research Division

While we teach the investing public, they also teach us. The purpose of this Division is to survey and learn from our students who represent a broad cross-section of the investing public. By doing so we have gained an unmatched understanding of their how they view the investing world, their expectations and their greatest fears. We also know the factors that individuals consider when choosing financial advisors and organizations to work with how they make investing decisions.

This incredibly valuable information is used by three NAOI Divisions. It is used by our Education Division to enhance our education course content. It is used by our R&D Division to create innovative investment products and investing methods that better meet the needs of the public. And it is used by our Consulting Division to show advisors and financial organizations how to attract more clients by offering products and services that better meet the needs of both institutional and individual investors.

The NAOI Financial Planning Center

The NAOI’s recognizes that Financial Planning is a critical element of wealth creation. As a result, we have created a Financial Planning Center as a part of our Education Division. In this area we provide students with a set of online, interactive financial planning calculators and worksheets that enable them to document their financial profile, set the investing goals they want to achieve in life and show them the actions they need to take in order to reach these goals.

These proprietary NAOI calculators and worksheets can be accessed for free on this site and are also available for licensing and branding by third parties. They can be found at this link.

The NAOI Research and Development Division

For over a decade after our founding in 1997 we took for granted that the only way to build investment portfolios was via the use of a portfolio design and management methodology called Modern Portfolio Theory (MPT). Introduced to the market in the 1950’s, this approach dictates that portfolios be designed to match the risk tolerance of each investor and then held for the long-tern, through all economic conditions. A goal of our education content, therefore, was to teach MPT methods to the investing public. As time passed, however, we found that this thinking was wrong.

Following the market crash of 2008-2009, when the MPT portfolios we had taught our students to create lost significant value, we had to face the harsh reality that static, buy-and-hold, MPT portfolios, introduced to the market in the 1950’s, simply could not cope with modern volatile markets.

With this realization we opened the NAOI Research and Development Division to create innovative investing methods and investment types that better enable individuals to take advantage of the wealth creation potential of modern markets. It became clear to us that more then education was needed to empower investors; also needed was innovation. More information is found at this link.

The Creation of Dynamic Investment Theory and Dynamic Investments

The most recent development from the NAOI R&D division is the creation of an alternative approach to MPT for designing and managing portfolios called Dynamic Investment Theory (DIT). This theory creates an innovative investment type called Dynamic Investments (DIs) that are capable of changing the ETFs they hold based on a periodic sampling of market trends.

By being “market-sensitive”, extensive testing has shown that DIs are capable of producing significantly higher returns than virtually any MPT portfolio with lower risk and absolute protection from market crashes.

The NAOI is currently including the use of Dynamic Investments in our education courses using the DI Users-Manual shown at right. NAOI students who have learned about DIT and DIs tell us that this is finally the approach to investing that will enable them, and thousands of others, to enter the market with confidence and without fear.

The NAOI Consulting Division

The NAOI Consulting Division was created to share our education content, investor research data and new investing products/methods with the financial services industry.

Via an NAOI Consulting Agreement we show financial professional how to create and offer investing products and methods that better meet the needs of the investing public than those being offered today. And, by doing so expand their client based, increase revenues and gain a massive competitive advantage in a very crowded field. For more information related to NAOI Consulting go to this link.

NAOI Partnerships

The NAOI offers Partnerships to financial organizations that share our passion for empowering individuals to invest with confidence and success.

Based on 20+ years of working with the investing public we have gained a sterling reputation as a strong advocate for the individual investor. A Partnership with the NAOI will elevate any organization’s “trust-factor” with the investing public. This is a significant competitive advantage in a field where a recent CFA Institute survey (found at this link) showed that only 23% of individual investors trust their financial advisor.

We also offer Research and Development Partnerships that enable organizations to work with the NAOI to create new proprietary products in conjunction with our development team.

More information related to NAOI Partnerships is found at this link.

NAOI Advisory Contracts

NAOI President Leland Hevner is available to join company Advisory Boards to ensure that the voice of the individual investor is heard and taken into consideration in a financial organization’s strategic planning process. Hevner’s CV is found at this link.

The True Evolution of Investing

Many organizations today are attempting to “evolve” the world of investing to meet the challenges of modern markets via a variety of fintech methods. And the NAOI sees much value in these efforts. But our experience in working with the investing public tells us that average investors has little interest in them. As one of my students stated: “They are simply putting lipstick on the MPT pig.”

The NAOI believes that true investing evolution comes only from changing how investing works at a fundamental level. And this mean challenging the use of Modern Portfolio Theory as the only way to create and manage portfolios. The NAOI is doing this with the introduction of Dynamic Investment Theory (DIT) as discussed above.

With the introduction of DIT we have already stepped out of the MPT “box” and opened the doors to a vast and virgin world of new and more effective investment product development. And we are working on other evolutionary changes as well, including developing a more effective definition and use of “investment risk”, that will have a major impact on how investing works moving forward.

No other organization is more effectively organized and positioned to define a better future of investing, and then make it happen, than the NAOI.

Let’s Talk

There is absolutely no simpler, easier, quicker or more cost effective way for a financial organization to expand its product line with superior products, capture more clients and increase revenues than by working with the NAOI. Feel free to contact me directly at LHevner@naoi.org, or on LinkedIn to learn more about how we can work together to make this happen.

“The Future of Investing Starts Here” is a registered trademark of Leland Hevner and the NAOI.