I’ve recently realized that for the past several years as an investment advisor, I’ve been doing my best to force square pegs into round holes. And it hasn’t worked very well.

You’d think with all my experience, it would have become obvious much sooner, but apart from being uncomfortable, I had no clear understanding until about a year ago. Now, I finally have a realistic solution to offer.

Readers of this blog will have found several posts under the heading “alternative investments”. These are non-traditional places or things into which one can invest. The idea is to further diversify your investments so that the various elements are as uncorrelated as possible.

Several weeks ago I introduced this chart. It shows, in well defined colors, the periods over the past 114 years, that can be described as secular bull markets and secular bear markets. There is a consensus that we are currently in a secular bear market. That’s the red column on the right going sideways.

Mathew Vincent, writing in the Financial Times today, laments that “no account or asset class appears capable of delivering protection against inflation, or dismal market sentiment”. You can no longer rely on dividends from the major banks of the world. See Bank of America stock. Gold itself now carries more downside risk as it passed $1,900 an ounce for the second time this past week.

During the last secular bull market, it really didn’t matter if you tried to shove a square peg in a round hole. If it didn’t work for a few days or weeks, you could simply put it somewhere else and it fit. Something like 93% of all investment days were positive, 4% were down days, with the rest recovering from the down days.

Most of us learned how to invest during those 18 years. The rules we learned seemed cast in stone – buy and hold, invest for the long term, hang in there, invest in indexes and keep the cost down. If you are doing this today, you either better have an extremely long time horizon or be prepared to wring your hands in frustration for the next several years.

Personally, I’m sick and tired of trying to make square pegs fit in round holes. So I’ve found a few places where the holes are designed so that the pegs I’m carrying actually fit. You have no idea how my life has improved as a financial advisor. It’s exciting.

So if you have money invested somewhere, be it a retirement account or something else, the old adage about how square pegs will not fit in round holes applies to you. You have to either find a square hole, or watch your money climb and fall, climb and fall. If you do this for the next several years, you might have as much as you started with today, but several years of your life will be gone, and you cannot get them back.

Can I guarantee results for you? No, I cannot. But I can significantly improve your chances of having a more positive outcome over what you are doing now.