Financial Planning – Investments – Insurance & Risk Management
Recently friends have been asking me to help them with their 401k selections at their workplace. Most of them are pretty standard, a list of mutual funds, roughly 30-50 investment choices with percentage drop-down boxes and rebalancing options. While reading into some of the investment choices, I noticed that many mutual funds have what are [...]
QE1, then QE2 and now QE3. Here’s a brief video that discusses this topic. http://bloom.bg/RNklXc I would like to just add a few things. First, I agree in that equities is where it is at. With bond prices driven to what they are now, the yields are so small and when, not if, [...]
Everyone who has gone to an investment advisor or any mutual fund company has probably heard of Dollar Cost Averaging. You invest a fixed amount of money periodically and the result is that you buy more when prices are low and less when prices are high. But with this method, there is good and definitely [...]
There has been many articles and news about how great ETFs are and how they provide great ways for people to get exposures to specific markets or sectors. This is true and can be seen by the flood of money that has entered ETFs in the past 5-10 years. You may wonder what an ETF [...]
We have mentioned the P/E ratio and how it is widely used to evaluate stocks and indices. In our previous post, we used it to evaluate the market as a whole to get a feel for if Mr. Market is overvalued, neutral or undervalued. This time, we can take a look at it on a [...]
Most people who watched CNBC or have taken interest in investing has heard of Mad Money with Jim Cramer. While browsing CNBC, I saw an article on Mr. Cramer and it reminded me of this interview done by Jon Stewart from the Daily Show (which I am fan of). Many people love Jim Cramer and eat up his stock picks [...]
Social media games and apps have become very popular over the last few years. Due to the generally cheap cost of producing an app, especially with a small team coding on their off hours after work, led to quite a few success stories. One of the biggest, Zynga (ZNGA) is well known for its large success with [...]
It’s always pretty important to know what and how you’re paying for, especially with investments and advice. We mentioned this in our mutual fund fee analysis post. Advisors come in all sorts of shapes and sizes but there are 3 main methods of charging. Fee only, Fee based and commission. Fee only means the advisor [...]
Fees eat into our returns so it pays to know what is being charged and how. After our overview about ETFs and mutual funds, we can now dig a bit deeper into mutual funds and discuss the different types of shares and the fees associated with them. Namely type A, B and C shares. Type A shares [...]
There are a few ways to measure if Mr. Market is overvalued, undervalued or fairly valued. 3 can be easily used to give you a general sense of how hard it will be to find good prices on investments. While it may be harder or easier, there will be deals in every type of market, it just generally [...]