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  • A Quick Jolt For the Auto Economy, Plus Ten
    Every new American-made car buyer would receive a debit card along with his ownership papers. The card could be used for anything other than the car purchase itself. Card amounts would vary from $6,000 for "smart" cars, through $3,000 for fuel-efficient sub-compacts, $1,000 for other borderline greenies.
  • Amazon Investment Book Reviews: Have You Been Brainwashed?
    Big publishers want to sell already big names; discovering new ones is not in their wheelhouse. Are they responsible for the problems in the financial markets? Of course not, but they do have a perverse, if indirect, impact--- they contribute to the brainwashing. Without a wider distribution of new ideas based on old wisdom, Wall Street as usual remains Wall Street as usual.
  • Asset Allocation for Foundation and Endowment Investment Portfolios
    One can only speculate about how much "bubble paper" finds its way into the these portfolios, but nearly all of them are managed by the major brokerage firms, and all such firms bonus their brokers on the basis of product sales. It is not uncommon for Wall Street to re-write the syllabus for Investments 101, redefining quality, diversification, and income to suit its own dark purposes.
  • Compound Stock Earnings Programs - Caveat Investor
    Options are bets about the future price movement of exchange-traded securities--- it's just that simple. The prospect of unusually high returns always signals unusually high risk. Caveat emptor, in spades. Here are some things to consider before you think about attending that free seminar:
  • Good News For Income Investors
    Admittedly, even if your asset allocation has been fine tuned for years, lower portfolio market values in this area make stock market valuation shrinkage feel even worse. But the value of stable cash flow becomes painfully clear for investors who misguidedly depend on capital gains for their spending money.
  • Guaranteed Social Security Benefits: Make It So
    This is a conceptual outline, a starting point for developing the nitty-gritty details, rules, regulations, laws, and agencies. All that is required is the will to change. Politicians like to debate changes to determine why new ideas can't be implemented. Here's a plan that must be implemented. Have a listen, throw out an incumbent.
  • Income Investing: Go Ask Alice
    Don't let such uniformed thinking sabotage your retirement program; don't let the selfish advice of a product sharpshooter send you chasing rabbits when IRE (interest rate expectations) or other temporary market conditions shrink the market value of your income portfolio. Feed your head; feed---your---head.
  • Investment Management - Put More Smart Cash In Your Future
    It's smart cash because it is created by the operation of the portfolio and ready for reinvestment. If it remains uninvested while new investment opportunities exist, it loses IQ points rapidly. If you've ever turned an unrealized gain into a realized loss, this is an approach you need to consider.
  • Investment Performance - Better Than You Think
    The Working Capital Model (WCM) approach to portfolio performance evaluation eliminates the tears and fears because it is based on more than the current market value illusion of wealth--- a number that won't sit still long enough to ever be meaningful. Market value, within the WCM, is used only to determine what to buy and/or when to take profits
  • Investment Performance Analysis - Simplified
    Let's develop an "all you need to know" chart that will help you manage your way to investment success in a low failure rate, unemotional, environment. The chart will have four data lines, and your portfolio management objective will be to keep three of them moving upward through time.
  • Investment Politics: Jobs, The Economy, and Social Security
    Social Security benefits are grossly inadequate yet we continue to tax all forms of retirement benefits. Politicians ignore the simple solutions to these problems and no one seems to care about Social Security reform. It's just too big an issue to be so shockingly ignored, but the last politician with any courage--- well, I can't remember who that was either.
  • Investor Political Priorities - A Survey
    90% of all Americans are investors and, as such, there are issues that we need to hear about from the man who would be king. None of our could-be leaders are addressing the issues that would allow us to achieve our financial goals.
  • Just Another Credit Crunch?
    Many investors are beginning to think that income investing is every bit as risky as equity investing, but nothing has really changed in the relationship between these two basic building blocks of corporate finance. What has changed in recent years is the nature of the derivative products created by the wizards of Wall Street to deliver both forms of securities to investors.
  • Last Bank Standing-The Wall Street Mega-Crash
    How many more businesses, jobs, and hopes will be killed by this irresponsible Congress? When will the average blogger realize that when a corporation fails, we all suffer? One would think that the informed and enlightened could take time out from their texting for a little research and education.
  • Making 401(k)s And IRAs More Like Pension Plans
    I'm not sure that the good doctor grasps the distinction between a self-directed, defined-contribution, investment plan and a guaranteed, defined-benefit, pension plan. Most plan participants are led to believe that the former is just as secure as the latter. Sorry, Charlie.
  • Predicting Stock Market Movements
    Wall Street spins reality in whatever manner it can to make most investors unhappy, thus increasing new product sales. Your confusion, fear, greed, impatience, and need for a quick panacea fuels their profit engines, not yours. Learn how to deal unemotionally with Wall Street events and shun the herd mentality.
  • Preventing Investment Mistakes: Ten Risk Minimizers
    Losing money on an investment may not be the result of a mistake, and not all mistakes result in monetary losses. Your own misconceptions about how securities react to varying economic, political, and hysterical circumstances are your most vicious enemy. Step away from calendar year, market value thinking. Avoid these ten common errors to improve your performance:
  • Quarterly Window Dressing - A Recurrent Wall Street Scam
    Why aren't the wizards of Wall Street assuaging our nerves by explaining the cyclical nature of the markets and pointing out that similar crises have always preceded the attainment of new all time highs? Right, because the unhappy investor is Wall Street's best friend. Why can't politicians address economic problems with capitalist-economic solutions?
  • Retirement Income Investing and Your Portfolio
    Brokerage firm monthly statements are designed to promote either fear or greed, depending on the current market environment. Nowhere on your statement can you find numbers that report your net investment, your total working capital, or your true asset allocation. Current and projected income numbers are given little attention
  • Retirement Income Investment Planning - Step One
    Employer provided pension plans, Social Security, and (always much too expensive) fixed annuity contracts, are retirement income providers. They are monthly income machines that you have paid dearly for but which may not be adequate to cover your retirement expenses--- most of us will need more income than our guaranteed benefits will provide.
  • Stock and Bond Trading Powers Modern Asset Allocation
    Trading is the world's oldest form of commercial activity, and it is unfortunate that it is treated with such disrespect by our dysfunctional tax code. It is even more unfortunate that it is looked at askance by client attorneys and brokerage firm compliance officers.
  • Stock Market Meltdown - Watching Rome Burn
    Scary markets are brought about by many factors, some normal, and some not so normal. It's often helpful to look backwards before getting too paranoid about the present. The S & L crisis of the early 80s might be an appropriate starting point.
  • Strategic Investment Mixology:Finding the Holy Grail Cocktail
    Investment portfolio mixology doesn't take place in the smiley faced environment that brought us the Cosmo and the Kamikaze, but putting an investment cocktail together without the risk of addictive speculations, or bad after tastes, is a valuable talent worth finding or developing for yourself.
  • The Investment Gods Are Angry
    Today's obsession with short-term blinks of the investment eye is Wall Street's attempt to take the market cycle out of the performance picture. Similarly, total return hocus-pocus places artificial significance on bond market values while it obscures the importance of the income produced. WCM users will have none of it; the investment gods are angry.
  • The McCain Tax Reform Plan For Long Term Economic Growth?
    The plan outlined here is investor and economy friendly. Where jobs are lost, new entities will be needed, based of the premise that regulated capitalism can work well. As shoppers and homeowners, as retirees and employees, as business owners and investors, this is the reform plan we need.
  • The Obama Tax Reform Plan For Long Term Economic Growth?
    Most economic research suggests that tax code replacement surgery is essential for long-term economic progress. The goal of my plan is to make sure that you are not grumbling ten years from now about the same things that trouble you today. This is a fifteen-point plan to end the cycle of economic frustration.
  • The Rally Is Coming! The Rally Is Coming!
    The market has never and will never be a one way ticket to ride (smile Beatles fans). None of the important aspects of the voyage (advances, declines, speed, beginning, or end) are predictable, by anyone, no matter how overpaid or well credentialed. Sooner or later, some gutsy financial gurus will declare the stock market oversold and full of bargains.
  • The Real Scoop on Annuities - Part One
    Today, it's difficult to distinguish one financial institution from another as they compete for the ever-growing pool of investment dollars. Insurance companies, now publicly owned, have become am integral part of an industry that seems uninterested in protecting anything other than their obscenely paid leaders.
  • The Securities Investors' Bill Of Rights (SIBORAP): Part Four
    All golden parachutes, separate "non-qualified" retirement plans, stock option and deferred compensation programs, and others that do not benefit all employees and shareholders will be unwound.
  • The Securities Investors' Bill Of Rights (SIBORAP): Part One
    We the securities investors of the United States, in order to form more transparent financial markets, establish effective regulations, defend against destructive speculation and manipulation, promote financial well-being, preserve working capital, and protect retirement income...
  • The Securities Investors' Bill Of Rights (SIBORAP): Part Three
    We the securities investors of the United States, in order to form more transparent financial markets, establish effective regulations, defend against destructive speculation and manipulation, promote financial well-being, preserve working capital, and protect retirement income...
  • The Securities Investors' Bill Of Rights (SIBORAP): Part Two
    We the securities investors of the United States, in order to form more transparent financial markets, establish effective regulations, defend against destructive speculation and manipulation, promote financial well-being, preserve working capital, and protect retirement income...
  • Value Stock Investing - The November Syndrome On Drugs
    Always keep in mind that (a) Wall Street has no respect for your intelligence and (b) the media "talking heads" are entertainers, not investors. Institutions must paint a picture of brilliance in their annual glossies. This year, a panic-stricken Main Street is helping them with their annual "sell low" hypocrisy.
  • Value Stock Market Crash Report
    A cocktail of credit market laxatives is working its way into a constipated world economy. Relief is on the way. Today's prices may well be looked at as the lowest of the next ten years! Here's a list of things to think about or to do while Investment Grade value Stock prices are at ten-year lows:
  • Volatility Rocks The Investment Markets
    Much of the current skittishness in the financial markets is caused by multiple economic concerns and the incredibly naive resolution ideas being spouted by the presidential candidates.
  • Wall Street Bailout, Congressional Cover-up, or Sarbanes-Oxley?
    More than 95% of Americans are making their mortgage payments right on schedule, yet there is no market for the financial products that contain these mortgages. Consequently, balance sheets reflect trillions of dollars less than the maturity value of the securities held by the financial institutions.
  • Wall Street Garage Sale Produces Closed End Fund Bargains
    Buffet, Bogle, Gross, Schwab, and Deep Pockets offer sound advice--- don't run and hide, it's time to hit the Wall Street Mall and go shopping! They've seen the indicators; they've been there before. So have many of you. Clearly, it's time for action.
  • WCM Investing - The Process
    Most people enter the investment process tip first. They hear something, grab an idea from a popular blog, accept a Cramerism or some motley foolishness, and think that they are making investment decisions. Rarely, will the right-now, instant-gratification, Internet-generation speculator think in terms that go beyond tomorrow's breaking news.
  • WCM-Investing Rules Of Engagement-The QDI
    Crash! The 2007 thru 2008 financial crisis halved 401(k), IRA, and Mutual Fund values in a matter of months. For many, retirement dates had to be pushed back; for others, new jobs had to be found. The tragic flaw? No income allocation in the investment program. Market value builds egos; income pays the bills.
  • When All Stocks Are Value Stocks - Think QDI
    How do we create a confidence building Stock Selection Universe? Simply operating on blind faith with one of the common definitions may be too simplistic, particularly since many of the numbers originate from the subject companies. Here are five filters you can use to come up with a listing of higher quality companies:
  • Why 401(k) Retirement Plans Really Don't Work
    Although it is true that you do not pay income taxes on your contributions up front, during your earning years, you will undoubtedly pay through both nostrils when you attempt to retire. If your parents have planned poorly, you may find yourself trying to retire at a time when the stock market is not in a party mood---
  • Your 401(k) Investments And The IGVSI
    Risk minimization begins with quality, is enhanced through diversification, and is compounded with realized income. The first two steps require research, greed control, and discipline. The income part just requires discipline, so it should be much easier to manage.
  • Zero Overhead Real Estate Investing--- Right Now
    You buy these securities for the income, but always recognize that you have the bonus capability of selling your shares when they rise to an acceptable profit level... so when it comes to Real Estate, think: no attorneys, no debt, and no maintenance equal no problem.
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