Automatic Investment Management (AIM-Hi)

The AIM system, and its later improvement the AIM-Hi system, were invented and popularized by Robert Lichello in his unfortunately-named book 'How to Make $1,000,000 in the Stock Market Automatically'. The name makes it appear to be some sort of get-rich-quick scheme, whereas it does contain an excellent get-rich-slowly-but-surely scheme which works far better than the traditional 'buy and hold' approach.

One of the hardest decisions for a long-term investor is deciding when and how much to buy, and when and how much to sell. The classic and timeless advice is "Buy low and sell high", but many investors act completely the other way round, selling low due to fear and buying high due to greed. So to our minds the beauty of Robert Lichello's system lies in the discipline which it imposes on the investor.

Another strong point of AIM-Hi is the ease of operation. The choice of timeframe is up to you, depending on how hands-on you like to be with your investments. You may decide to operate AIM-Hi monthly (our favourite), quarterly, or even once a year, and the whole process in arriving at your single buy/sell decision and amount will take no more than ten minutes!

You may operate AIM-Hi with a mutual fund, an ETF, or a portfolio of stocks within a single program, or you could operate a separate AIM-Hi program for each individual stock - the choice of 'fuel' for the system is up to the investor. Ideally, the system performs best when it is given volatile, high-beta stocks to work with, i.e. growth stocks rather than value stocks, but in practice it can handle all types.If you are a cautious investor who prefers to buy defensive income stocks you may not get as much action from your AIM program, but at least it will take the emotion out of your buy and sell decisions.

AIM-Hi is Robert Lichello's 'tweaking' of his original AIM program. One criticism of the original AIM was that it was too conservative, as the program commenced with a 50/50 split between stocks and cash, and in a prolonged bull run such as we had between 2009-13 more cash would have been thrown off, meaning the portfolio might end up 75-80% in cash. This was not such a major problem when Mr. Lichello first invented the system, since at that time you could get double-digit returns on your cash in a money market fund, but now that it's hard to find anyone who wants pay you for your surplus cash some adjustment was necessary. AIM-Hi basically supercharges the AIM system by starting out with an 80/20 split between stocks and cash. This rather presupposes that the stock or fund will climb steadily for some time after purchase in order to throw off cash ready for the eventual downturn. If the downturn occurs soon after starting your program you may drain your cash tank, but at least you will have bought more stocks at a 'sale' price.

For more concise information on AIM-Hi we recommend you go straight to the source and read Robert Lichello's book! The link above is for the latest printed edition of the book, and it is also available as a Kindle download. In addition you should go to the Aim Users Bulletin Board here. Pay particular attention to the posts of OldAIMGuy, aka Tom Veale. Since the death of Robert Lichello in 2001, Tom has done more than anyone to improve the system and educate new users.