by Warren Parker

If you want to be a successful investor in the future, then it is essential that you learn more about mutual funds and how they can benefit you. The best performing mutual funds will allow you to spread your investments across different assets thereby reducing your risk.

There are many mutual fund investment tips one, of which is to look at the past performance of a specific fund in order to determine how well it will do in the future which is not a very good indicator. Taking a look at the trade volume of particular mutual fund is also ineffective.

So given this situation, how can you find the best performing mutual funds available?

The answer to this question depends on what types of investments you want to invest in. When learning more about mutual funds, you will learn that there are literally thousands of different available funds …

by Peter Howard

There are many global macro investing strategies that make use of the yield curve. While primarily used to trade bonds, there are also several good uses for trading stocks and currencies as well. In fact as powerful as the yield curve is, there is likely a few yield curve strategies for every asset class out there.

The Treasury yield curve is the curve you get when you plot out the yields for different maturities. For instance if the 90-day T-Bill is at .2 percent and the 10-year T-Note is yielding 3.5 percent you have an up sloping yield curve as the long dated Treasuries are paying a higher yield then the short dated Treasuries. Usually you would also plot out the two year, five year, and thirty year along with the ninety day and ten year. This will give you a better …

by Rick Amorey

You’ve had that degree for a few years now, and you have been working non-stop since then. Chances are, you were able to build up your savings properly through the years. You haven’t bothered about that student loan ever since you paid it off for the first two years of your employment. A glance at your savings account then tells you that now are the time for an investment. I imagine you have no plans of being an employee forever.

Your mind is now made up, and you want to start investing. The next question, then, is how do you plan to invest that hard-earned cash? There are quite a number of investments that you may choose to involve yourself in, but know that you have to choose carefully. Here are some of the more popular choices out there:

*Investing in your own business. This is probably the …

by Rick Amorey

The science of investing and trading requires the understanding of many complex things should you plan to make it in that venture. If there is only one advice that I could give to someone who wants to go ahead and invest, though, it is this: Don’t bet it all on one fight. Spread out your portfolio; don’t settle for just one.

I fully understand that many people find the prospect of multiple investments close to impossible. As much as you want to spread out, you have to start in that first investment somewhere. Unfortunately for you, these investments usually start at a high price. In many cases, that price is too high for the average American. So, many beginning investors end up in the trap of putting it all in one stock anyway. This is a potentially devastating move. Everyone has experienced bad purchases in their careers. …

by Terry K. Venova

We aren’t born with the right knowledge to effectively invest in stocks and bonds. Fortunately, you don’t have to be a finance expert to invest your money. Mutual funds is a way to invest in a variety of investments and you don’t have to do it all on your own. In fact, you can get someone else to do it entirely.

Mutual funds are pretty easy to understand. Everyone pools their money into a much larger investment. A fund manager does all the research and work to choose investments to invest in that are correctly diversified. They then use the pooled in money to invest in what they chose.

Not all mutual funds are created equally. Some have fees, and some don’t. Load mutual funds charge you a fee because they feel they can earn you a higher than …

The Working Capital Model (WCM) looks at investment performance differently, less emotionally, and without a whole lot of concern for short-term market value movements. Market value performance evaluation techniques are only used to analyze peak-to-peak market cycle movements over significant time periods.

Security market values are used for buy and sell decision-making. Working capital figures are used for asset allocation and diversification calculations. Portfolio working capital growth numbers are used to evaluate goal directed management decisions over shorter periods of time.

WCM tracking techniques help investors focus on long term growth producers like capital gains, dividends, and interest— the things that can keep the working capital line (see Part One) moving ever upward. The base income and cumulative realized capital gains lines are the most important WCM growth engines.

Please refer to the chart in Chapter 7 of The Brainwashing of the …

It matters not what lines, numbers, indices, or gurus you worship, you just can’t know for certain where the stock market is going or when it will change direction. Too much investor time and analytical effort is wasted trying to predict course corrections— even more is squandered comparing portfolio market values with a handful of unrelated indices and averages.

Annually, quarterly, even monthly, investors scrutinize their performance, formulate coulda’s and shoulda’s, and determine what new gimmick to try during the next evaluation period. My short-term performance vision is different. I see a bunch of Wall Street fat cats, ROTF-LOL, while investors beat themselves senseless over what to change, sell, buy, re-allocate, or adjust to make their portfolios behave better.

Why has performance evaluation become so important short-term? What happened to long-term planning toward specific personal goals? When did it become …

Every correction is the same, a normal downturn in one or more of the markets where we invest. There has never been a correction that has not proven to be an investment opportunity. You can be confident that governments around the world are not going to allow another Great Depression “on their watch”.

Every correction is different, the result of various economic and/or political circumstances that create the need for adjustments in the financial markets.
While everything is down in price, as it is now, there is actually less to worry about. When the going gets tough, the tough go shopping.

In this case, an overheated real estate market, an overdose of financial bad judgment, and a damn the torpedoes stock market, propelled by demand for speculative derivative securities and Hedge Funds, finally came unglued.

But it is the reality of corrections that is …

by Rick Amorey

People who would like to invest in meaningful stocks or secure bonds quickly come to realize that their options are unfortunately limited. Face the facts; investments require a high capital, in general, that a lot of people cannot afford. Even the safest of investments still come with a risk factor, and between these costs for investing and the current volatile situation, a lot of people find that investing may not be worth the risk.

For people like these, mutual fund investing could be a solution to this problem. How mutual funds work; an investment company pools together the cash of their shareholders, and use the cash collected to make bigger investments in stocks, bonds and other short-term agreements with a relatively high yield. This is the perfect way for beginning investors to take part in the world of investments.

One major drawback of a mutual fund is that …

Now more than ever, you can appreciate the need for comprehensive investment education. All of a sudden, fifty percent of your nest egg has disappeared— and the bad news? There never was a plan for income generation. Ouch!

Dwelling on coulda’s, woulda’s, and shoulda’s isn’t going to rebuild your portfolio. Attempting to become proficient in the speculation of the month will do little to decrease the long-term pain. Casting blame on government regulators and Wall Street scam artists does little to grow retirement income.

There are at least three things you can do to protect yourself now, and throughout your more quickly approaching than you realize retirement years:

(1) Actively support income tax code replacement surgery, be it Flat Tax, Fair Tax, or a combination; (2) actively support a Social Security reform plan with smaller mandatory contributions, higher guaranteed benefits, and trustee managed income …