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	Documents 1 - 10 of 27     1   2   3     Is The Investment Industry Flawed? View Article When it comes to personal finance, what keeps individuals awake at night is whether or not they are on track to retire, if their money is invested properly, and if some unforeseen disaster could destroy their lifetime of hard work. The average investor is disillusioned with the financial services industry, and fears that investment advisors and financial planners are not focused on serving their individual needs. This is easy to understand once one takes into account the intentional confusion of clients, numerous conflicts of interest, outrageous fee structures, and limited scope of most investment advisors.   click here to e-mail this article to a friend Are Bonds Still The Safest Asset or The Next Buble? View Article With bond prices soaring to all-time highs, many fixed income investors have record levels of unrealized gains adding up in their portfolios. Many of these investors are now extremely bull¬ish on bonds, and with one of strongest and longest rallies in history, it is easy to see why. Bonds are traditionally heralded as the safe haven and many investors consider them to be low risk. Its our belief that investors have entered a unique investment environ¬ment with economic realities&that when coupled with prevailing fiscal policy& significantly changes the risk dynamics of bonds. While bonds will always be an extremely important asset class, never has there been so many pitfalls and risks surrounding their uti¬lization. We believe it is of paramount importance for bond investors to move decisively now to implement risk management strategies   click here to e-mail this article to a friend Preventing Insurance Disasters View Article As the Waldo Canyon Fire bore down on the city of Colorado Springs last summer, many people were suddenly forced to consider a host of frightening questions. What happens if my home is damaged or destroyed? Will my homeowners insurance be sufficient for me to rebuild? What happens if I have smoke damage, or if part of my home is destroyed? What about my personal property? How will I ever remember all the items in my home in case of a loss? Theres nothing like a natural disaster to cause these worries to surface. The best time to plan for such catastrophes is when none are looming so that all of the proper precautions can be taken in a thoughtful , unhurried manner.   click here to e-mail this article to a friend Blending Finance with the Tax Rules View Article Regardless of where tax rates end up in 2013, they are prone to an upwards path given the looming fiscal issues facing the nation. For investors concerned with tax efficiency, or the ability to minimize taxes over the long term, the necessity of paying attention to the taxability of investment and retirement income over the next 10-20 years has heightened. And in this low rate-of-return environment, some argue this need is even greater than deciding what growth fund manager to use for your portfolio or the next hot stock tip.   click here to e-mail this article to a friend How To Measure The Market View Article So how do you value the share price of stock for a given company? In other words, what is the intrinsic value of a given stock? Generally speaking, a stock is valued based on the company's current financial state and what the market believes the company's future financial state will look like.   click here to e-mail this article to a friend Is Long Term Care Insurance Dead? View Article According to a recent article in The Wall Street Journal, when Prudential Financial announced that it plans to stop taking applications for individual long term care (LTC) insurance policies on March 30, 2012, it became the 10th of the top 20 insurers by sales to leave the LTC market in the last five years. To compound the problem of insurers leaving the LTC market, many of the remaining insurers have raised premiums dramatically for existing policyholders in recent years.   click here to e-mail this article to a friend 2011 - A Turbulent Year In Review View Article One of the most interesting things about investing is the long-term disconnect between world events and the behavior of investment markets. Every day, we hear that the markets went up or down as a result of this or that dramatic event or piece of economic data in the news. But if Rip Van Investor had fallen asleep at the start of the 20th century, and woke up with a yawn 100 years later at midnight, December, 1999, he would have been startled to see that his investment in the S&P 500 had gained more than 10% a year, on average, during his 100-year nap.   click here to e-mail this article to a friend Who Needs Fixed Income Anyway? View Article For decades, the financial services industry has been pushing the idea that stocks are the way for savvy individual investors to make serious money. As the bull markets of the mid-1980s and late 1990s roared, it became an article of faith that only the timid would resort to buying bonds. Now, with the bear market of 2008-2009 still fresh in our memories, the financial services industry has swung fully to the other direction, pushing the supposed reliability of annuities as the new salvation product.   click here to e-mail this article to a friend The Next Tech Bubble? View Article Those of us who watched the LinkedIn initial public offering experienced a strange sense of deja vu. The social media company was offered to the public at $45 a share, and an unexpected buying frenzy took the price up 171% on the first day of trading, before the company settled back to just over $94 a share--more than 109% above the offering price.   click here to e-mail this article to a friend Inflation Fears Rise Again View Article Recently, we've been hearing a lot about inflation, and the government statistics released on April 15 didn't do a lot to quiet the chatter. The government reported that the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers rose to an annualized 2.7% in March, up from 1.6% in February. Troll through the latest batch of YouTube videos, and you see pundits and other observers suggesting (sometimes screaming) that the Federal Reserve Board is printing money, leading the U.S. to become another Zimbabwe or Weimar Republic.   click here to e-mail this article to a friend