SmartKnowledgeU™ Frequently Asked Questions

A: No. SmartKnowledgeU™ provides no personalized investment advice. SmartKnowledgeU™, LLC does not provide individual investment advice, manage money, or act as an investment advisor. We are an educational system and investment research service only and provide no money management services through SmartKnowledgeU™. If you desire a private consultation, we provide those services through another company of ours, Blue Ocean Investing, LLC and you can learn more here. Our educational curriculum teaches our customers how to leverage the best possible information sources that have been made available through the flattening of the information world to identify stocks with low-risk, high-reward setups and many stocks and asset classes that are largely ignored or unknown by the average investor. Thus, while we do not provide any specific and personalized investment advice, we do provide a revolutionary system of investing strategies and an investment education that will last a lifetime. While we offer our opinions about specific asset classes and stocks, our opinions are strictly for informational purposes and should not be construed as investment advice. Furthermore, we do not provide any legal or tax advice and one should always consult your CPA or tax adviser in regard to the implementation of our strategies. While J.S. Kim, family, and associates may own the stocks discussed in our newsletters, to avoid a conflict of interest, no stock discussed in our newsletters will be sold or bought within 24 hours of any discussed buy or sale unless a sale is automatically triggered by a stop-loss recommendation strategy that has been previously discussed and/or previous strategies that were previously in use prior to the publication of any monthly newsletter.

A: When we first launched SmartKnowledgeU™ in 2006, we spent a lot of time researching our competitors, and even purchased subscriptions to many different newsletters to study the offerings of our competition. We discovered that many investment newsletter publishers that offer 30-day to 90-day trial periods offer up investment ideas, and no specific information about entry and exit price points or a range of entry and exit price points that could lead to huge discrepancies in annual returns. We also discovered that many of these newsletters did not offer a running tally of yield YTD every year because they did not offer a specific model portfolio. Instead, many investment newsletters offered a list of stocks from which a subscriber would have to choose his or her portfolio so that every subscriber might have a different portfolio. This strategy allows such investment newsletters to concentrate on marketing schemes in which they tout huge winners that "returned 434% in just 21 days!", or "250% returns in just 14 days!", while ignoring the numerous stocks on their lists that lost 80% or more in 30-90 days. This is why you almost never see any newsletter publisher that prints such claims also print the quarterly performance of their overall portfolios. If they did, then such newsletters may possess overall portfolio returns of perhaps 10% or even negative 20%, which of course does not sound nearly as attractive as making "434% returns in 21 days!" Therefore, since such newsletters do not offer specific guidance that would allow anyone to re-create a "model portfolio" that could significantly outperform the market and then cancel their subscription and receive a full refund, they have NOTHING to lose by offering such long trial periods to potential subscribers. On the contrary, we do.

In our opinion, what we discovered through our research before we decided to launch our company in 2006, was that the vast majority of investment newsletter publishers, even the ones with the largest subscriber bases, are superior marketing machines, but really do not create any significant wealth whatsoever for their subscriber bases. They rather capitalize on the naivete and gullibility factor of the average person to dupe customers into buying their product by selling them dreams of "wealth" while in reality, they almost never deliver. When we discovered this, we decided we wanted to be the one company that would be different and actually deliver on our claims. We didn't want to dupe our customers into thinking we could make them wealthy, but we actually wanted to make them wealthy. We decided to differentiate ourselves from 99% of all other investment newsletters by offering a level of detail and specificity that is not available in any newsletter we were able to find that had an annual fee of less than $USD 2,000 a year. So with our Crisis Investment Opportunities newsletter, we decidedly combined value and quality in a top notch offering. For us at SmartKnowledgeU™, copying the industry practices of other investment newsletter publishers would be severely damaging to our business due to the level of specific information we offer in every issue, that in 2009, averaged 35-45 pages in length, instead of the flimsy 5-6 page issues you may receive for an investment newsletter that only charges $99 - $199 a year with horrible performance, little insight, no specific model portfolio, and 90-day free trials.

Because our investment newsletter product offering is a pioneer, elite offering among a sea of charlatans, we want to set what the industry standards should be, not copy them. We feel that no newsletter that offered valuable specific information that could successfully guide you to returns that consistently and significantly beat their comparable stock indexes could ever offer 90-day trial offers with a money-back-guarantee. If this were the case, then people would be foolish not to sign-up for 90-days, receive this elite information for free that could guide their investment decisions for many months to come, and ask for a refund. We know if we ever found a competitor that was foolish enough to offer such elite information for free for 90-days that this is what we would do. And this investment newsletter publisher would probably suffer from a 90% refund request rate. But in all of the research we conducted over the past 5 years, we haven't found a single investment newsletter that offers a 90-day trial where the information accessible during that time period was invaluable. We feel that were we to offer a 3-month trail to the Crisis Investment Opportunities newsletter, that the information accessible during this time period would be invaluable. Whereas there is nothing to be lost by our newsletter competitors that offer 90-day trials, there is much to be lost in terms of intellectual property were we to offer such a comparable lengthy trial.

This is why we offer only one complimentary recent issue and a 14-day evaluation period with a money back guarantee to our potential subscribers. We feel that the complimentary issue we offer during this 14-day trial period will convincingly illustrate to any interested subscriber just how different we are from 99% of the investment newsletter publishers out there. Furthermore, our pre-launch research showed that those investment newsletter publishers that offered long trial periods suffered anywhere from a 6% to 12% refund request rate. We believe the time required to process such a large percent of refund requests are an enormous waste of corporate resources and time. Thus, we decided to also cut our free-trial period to a shorter time than our competitors to weed out the percentage of investors that always exist that are never serious about paying for elite information but just trying to extract premium information for free. This has been a good strategy for us as in the past 3 years (2006-2009) we have only been asked to provide 4 refunds with our investment newsletters services, and NOT ONE SINGLE REFUND with any of our other services. We believe that providing a higher level of service and quality of information than 99% of our competitors will allow all of our potential customers to understand the core value of our higher level priced services, and indeed, our almost non-existent track record of refund requests verifies that our paying customers do indeed feel the same way. Finally, a 14-day trial period provides sufficient time to digest all of the materials provided with our free-trial periods. Thus, we believe that if a potential client is truly serious about subscribing to our services, he or she will likely review our free trial period materials within the first 7 days. It will remain our corporate mission to continue to attract only those clients serious about subscribing to an elite provide of investment research while filtering out of the queue those who aren't.

A: Upon payment access to all content of your paid subscription level, your username and log in will be activated in about 24 hours. If you signed up for the 14-day trail membership, you will be granted limited access to membership materials as described in all fact sheets available on our homepage at http://www.smartknowledgeu.com. If you signed up for immediate access, then you will receive full access to ALL membership materials within 24 hours of payment. Access to our course content, exercises, exam questions, and special reports is all online and is made available by logging in with the unique username and password that you selected upon payment.

A:Please do NOT write J.S. Kim any emails asking for personal advice as to how you should invest your money in response to this crisis. If you wish to receive individualized attention, you can schedule a private consultation with him or consider our monthly investment newsletter. Please understand that he will not respond to personal requests for free advice as he can not provide any intelligent information without having a lengthy discussion with someone about their personal goals and risk appetite. Furthermore, given the volume of emails that J.S. receives every month, it is physically impossible for him to respond to these types of emails on a personal basis.

A: Our system relies on utilizing information made available, some only within the past several years, to identify corporate money trails to significantly change the risk-reward paradigm from the advantage of the big investment firm to the individual investor. Our MoneyPing™ strategies leverage information regarding the close ties among governments, powerful financial institutions and corporations to identify the best investments opportunities in the global arena. In doing so, we do not rely on fundamental or technical analysis as our primary screens, but instead rely on other sources of predictive information highly correlated to annual returns of 25% or more.

Accesibility to corporate, political, and financial information has increased tremendously over the past decade, yet we at SmartKnowledgeU, are the only ones that have learned how to leverage this information to better predict the best and safest places to invest your money. We call our strategies the long tail of investing and believe that they are the only strategies you should ever place your faith in when deciding how to allocate your hard-earned dollars, yen, or euros.

A: Most investors take the well-traveled, broad path to mediocrity. They simply hand their money over to a big firm that then uses the lowest common denominator, the Modern Portfolio Theory of Diversification, to invest your money into a portfolio so diversified; you are virtually guaranteed mediocre returns year after year after year. To earn superior returns, you absolutely must take the path to excellence that very few investors are willing to take. And that path requires learning how to do-it-yourself.

Again, if you view this path as a lifelong commitment and place it in its proper perspective then the choice should be a simple one. Most people commit at least eight to twelve hours a day to a job, that unless it pays you more than several hundred thousand dollars a year, will never earn you financial freedom. Learning to invest your money properly is far more likely to earn you financial freedom than your job. Most people again, will freely devote another five hours a week outside of work for professional designations that enhance their “sale-ability” as a professional but yet again, are unlikely to earn them financial freedom.

Depending on the pace you work at, an hour a day will most likely be sufficient for the majority of people to complete our course including all exercises and exams within six months to a year to feel sufficiently ready to utilize our strategies. Again, this is just a rough estimate, as certainly particularly motivated individuals or those that are not working full time with more free time will be able to complete our entire course within a month to several months, leaving more time to review practice exercises before actually putting our strategies to work for them.

Think of this as an investment that will last you the rest of your lifetime that will help you build wealth and achieve financial freedom. If you have a large account with a global investment firm and execute three to five trades that involve large blocks of shares, your commissions alone for these few trades can exceed several thousand dollars. If you buy a flat screen plasma TV, you will most likely pay in the area of $4,000 or more. One nice family vacation is sure to cost you more than $5,000. And if you buy something as simple as two Starbuck frapuccinos a day, M-F, throughout the year, within 2 years, you will spend over $5,000 on coffee alone.

Furthermore, since our system allows you to identify some of the safest places to invest money, we allow you to invest with less risk and worry as conventional means of investing. If you have 30 years, or even just 20 years of investing left in your lifetime, the price to learn our comprehensive system will cost you about $0.50 a day. As our strategies have led to instances where our members have earned multiples of our fees in just a matter of weeks, it is certainly possible to recoup the membership fees very quickly as this crisis deepens. For further information on our value compared to other investment services, please download our FREE e-book by visiting this webpage and entering your email.

A:Again, we do not provide any specific, personalized advice through any of our SmartKnowledgeU™ services. We sometimes receive hundreds of inquiries per week and it is impossible for us to respond to each inquiry individually. However, if many of our members have the same question, then we address these questions in special member alerts, updates to curriculum, or the following month's newsletter (in the case of our investment newsletter). As far as individual consultations, we have another company, Blue Ocean Investments, LLC, that will handle individual consultations. Please check our homepage for more information regarding this service.

A: When markets are doing well, everyone is an expert - a rising tide lifts all boats. Ten years ago, when the U.S. markets were returning about 18% a year, nobody needed any help. This is the saying in surgery as well – Surgery is incredibly easy if everything goes right. But what if things go wrong? Even when things go right, investors should be clearing 40% a year if market indexes are returning 18% with a proper investment system such as ours, so most individual investors still leave significant gains on the table. Similar markets to those times in the U.S. are now being experienced in Asian markets like China and India. However, all emerging markets will correct steeply at some point.

It is during these times, that most individuals that felt they were fine on their own will lose 20%, 30% or more very quickly. In fact, when I spoke to many of those people that in the early 90's "didn't need help" during market downturns and asked them what they were doing, the overwhelming majority said, "just sitting tight and waiting for markets to come back." This is not a strategy. If you lose 30% in down markets then you will need to earn over 60% the next year just to earn a 15 % return from the point the markets started falling. A great system will make you money in market downturns as well as market bull runs. That’s the advantage the SmartKnowledgeU™ investment system gives you. Our system will grant you the best chance of making money during turbulent global markets as well as bull global markets. You can review for yourself the incredible benefit of learning the longtail of investment strategies by tracking our “Success Stories” page by clicking on the button at the top of this page.

A:Yes. As we stated in our Legal Notice, Disclaimer and Terms of Use link available at the bottom of all our webpages, a single username and password may NOT be shared among multiple persons. All individual memberships are monitored daily for username and password sharing violations, and any violations of our Terms of Use are sufficient grounds for membership termination and forfeiture of all paid membership fees. If you wish to purchase a corporate membership package, there is a minimum number of five memberships required to qualify. With a minimum of five memberships, we will apply a discount of $1,000 per individual. For example, if you wanted to purchase a Platinum corporate membership plan for five individuals, your total cost, if the individual Platinum membership rate at the time is $7,000 (our rates have increased every year due to demand), would be 5 x $6,000 = $30,000. Please simply email us at info-at-smartknowledgeu-dot-com and we will be happy to set you up with a corporate membership plan.