How To Apply The Concealed Wisdom of Equitable Holdings’ Investment Strategy

The compelling statistics behind long-term market investment

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While researching an article, I found an interesting bit of empirical information. It’s something that doesn’t make the news. We don’t see it on the finance news channels like CNBC, Fox News Business, or Bloomberg. Most of what I see in financial news is idle speculation. And there is a ton of speculation in the securities markets. This one thing…they don’t teach it in our schools, either. What is it?

Equitable Holdings, Inc., is a company that helps people invest for retirement. They also sell insurance. To make money selling insurance, they have to capture actuarial data to estimate their risk of insuring someone. As an investment company, they collect empirical data on securities. Here are a few interesting facts about the company from Wikipedia:

Equitable Holdings, Inc. (formerly The Equitable Life Assurance Society of the United States and AXA Equitable Life Insurance Company, and also known as The Equitable) is an American financial services and insurance company that was founded in 1859 by Henry Baldwin Hyde. In 1991, French insurance firm AXA acquired majority control of The Equitable.

Huh. 1859…that’s some really old money. That also means they’ve been around long enough to know how to make money, keep it, and grow it. They know something that most Americans don’t know. Not too long ago, I read a story about a study on the topic of family wealth. It wasn’t very pretty. From C2 Wealth Strategies:

It can be easy to assume that a wealthy family has always been wealthy and will always be wealthy. But the truth is, around 70 percent of wealthy families lose their wealth by the second generation. Moreso, around 90 percent of families lose wealth by the third generation.

That is one hell of an attrition rate. What is striking about that finding is that most of the loss of wealth can be attributed to families not talking about money. Family wealth was lost because wealthy parents didn't talk to their kids about how money is made, how it’s invested, what protects it, or how to be thrifty so that one can hold onto wealth.