Of course you would prefer to skip this step and jump right into some new product athletic shoes that will hurdle you over the work and directly into the profits. How’s that been working out for you? It was once written (somewhere): no work, no reward.

Risk is compounded by ignorance, multiplied by gimmickry, and exacerbated by emotion. It is halved with education, ameliorated with cost-based asset allocation, and managed with disciplined: selection quality, diversification, and income rules— The QDI.

For the “rest of the story”:

http://kiawahgolfinvestmentseminars.net/Inv/index.cfm/6995

 Steve Selengut

http://www.sancoservices.com

Author of: “The Brainwashing of the American Investor: The Book that Wall Street Does Not Want YOU to Read”, and “A Millionaire’s Secret Investment Strategy”

But what is hedging all about in the first place?

Conspiracy theorists have their hands in the air. What’s that? Portfolio hedging strategies were created to expand the market for the first generation of derivative products— options and futures contracts. Hmmm, not so far fetched an idea, really. Just back up a bit and think about what they are trying to accomplish.

Hedges are designed to massage your market value numbers, a kind of security blanket that softens the highs and lows of the market cycle. But why focus on the fluff of transient market values in the first place? Cycles eventually correct themselves without the unnecessary drama, guesswork, risk, and trading fees.

It’s not the market value of the portfolio that is of primary importance. It’s the actual content of the portfolio and how you deal with the natural dynamics of the securities you own. Why can’t the media reinforce that kind of stuff instead of the emotion of the month?

If a portfolio has a semi-guaranteed “base income” of 4%, a 4% cushion (or hedge) is always in place, one that grows annually with proper asset allocation management, and adds to the market value in upward cycles— nah, too simple.

For the “rest of the story”:

http://kiawahgolfinvestmentseminars.net/Inv/index.cfm/6979

Steve Selengut

http://www.kiawahgolfinvestmentseminars.com/

http://www.sancoservices.com

Professional Portfolio Management since 1979

Author of: “The Brainwashing of the American Investor: The Book that Wall Street Does Not Want YOU to Read”

But it’s not nearly large enough to pay the bills, reduce the national debt, grow the economy, and come to the aid of all of the people in the world who need us. Why, because nearly half of us (some legally, some not so) pay little or no federal income taxes at all— and because our elected representatives have no financial management skills.

The only taxes that always get paid are those that reduce the amount of spending money in our pockets and which raise the cost of the goods and services we purchase — thus retarding economic growth.

First KISS: Create Jobs Right Now

Create jobs immediately by eliminating the corporate income tax (and all other fees, local taxes, assessments, ad nauseum) for any corporation that adds 10% to its permanent workforce and/or 20% to its total workforce.

Second KISS: Lower and Eliminate Taxes

Third KISS: Produce Sustainable Economic Growth

“The Rest of the Story”: http://kiawahgolfinvestmentseminars.net/Inv/index.cfm/6942

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Steve Selengut

http://www.kiawahgolfinvestmentseminars.com/

http://www.sancoservices.com

Professional Portfolio Management since 1979

Author of: “The Brainwashing of the American Investor: The Book that Wall Street Does Not Want YOU to Read”

Many of the advantages of Closed End Funds are discussed below. It should be abundantly clear that this form of investment has eliminated nearly all of the drawbacks of conventional mutual funds. The two have very little in common.

Trading Liquidity – Flexibility – Cost: Closed End Fund shares may be bought or sold at any time during the trading day, just like common stocks, and share prices will fluctuate. They are excellent start up investment vehicles for smaller accounts where diversification would otherwise be difficult to achieve.

There are no penalties for leaving the CEF when the stock is sold. The only direct cost involved is the commission paid when buying or selling the shares.

For “the rest of the story”: http://kiawahgolfinvestmentseminars.net/Inv/index.cfm/6938

Steve Selengut

http://www.kiawahgolfinvestmentseminars.com/

http://www.sancoservices.com

Professional Portfolio Management since 1979

Author of: “The Brainwashing of the American Investor: The Book that Wall Street Does Not Want YOU to Read”

Certainly, it’s a no brainer to sell a Jim Cramer, Peter Lynch, or Robert Kiyosaki effort while a “newbies” approach to solving the puzzles of Wall Street, requires some major financial risk. 

Are they responsible for the problems in the financial markets? Of course not, but they do have a perverse, if indirect, impact. By constantly publishing the same Wall Street friendly message, they contribute to the brainwashing. 

These reviews describe a book that Wall Street wants to keep in the closet, an educational and strategic breakthrough that would have allowed most investors to avoid the bubbles and derivatives that caused the three financial crises of our lifetimes — and if you don’t learn something (there will be a test) I’ll refund your purchase price. 

For the rest of the article: http://kiawahgolfinvestmentseminars.net/Inv/index.cfm/5758

 Steve Selengut

Author: The Brainwashing of the American Investor

The Stock Market is a dynamic place where investors can consistently make reasonable returns on their working capital if they comply with the basic principles of the endeavor AND if they don’t measure their progress too frequently with irrelevant measuring devices.

The classic investment strategy is so simple and so trite that most investors dismiss it routinely and move on in their search for the holy investment grail(s): a stock market that only rises and a bond market capable of paying higher interest rates at stable or higher prices — just not going to happen.

This is mythology, not investing. Investors who grasp the realities of these wonderful marketplaces recognize the opportunities and embrace them with an understanding that goes beyond the media hype and side show performance enhancement barkers.

Through the application of a few easy to memorize rules, you can plot a course to an investment portfolio that regularly achieves higher market value highs and (much more importantly) higher market value lows.

Five simple concepts of Asset Allocation, Investment Strategy, and Psychology are summed up quite nicely in what I call “The Investor’s Creed”:

For the rest of this article, go to:

http://kiawahgolfinvestmentseminars.net/Inv/index.cfm/5663

Steve Selengut

Author of: “The Brainwashing of the American Investor: The Book that Wall Street Does Not Want YOU to Read”

Prices go down because of speculator reactions to expectations of news, speculator reactions to actual news, and investor profit taking. The two former “becauses” are more potent than ever before because there is more self-directed money out there than ever before. And therein lies the core of correctional beauty!

Mutual Fund unit holders rarely take profits but often take losses. Additionally, the new breed of Index Fund Speculators over-react to news of any kind because that’s what speculators do. Thus, if this brief little hiccup becomes considerably more serious, new investment opportunities will be abundant!

Here’s a list of ten things to think about doing, or to avoid doing, during corrections of any magnitude:

For the rest of the article: http://kiawahgolfinvestmentseminars.net/Inv/index.cfm/6923

Sign at the office door of Dr. Jack Cassell, a Mount Dora urologist. (Photo by Deirdre Lewis / April 1, 2010)

MOUNT DORA — A doctor who considers the national health-care overhaul to be bad medicine for the country posted a sign on his office door telling patients who voted for President Barack Obama to seek care “elsewhere.”

“I’m not turning anybody away — that would be unethical,” Dr. Jack Cassell, 56, a Mount Dora urologist and a registered Republican opposed to the health plan, told the Orlando Sentinel on Thursday. “But if they read the sign and turn the other way, so be it.”

The sign reads: “If you voted for Obama … seek urologic care elsewhere. Changes to your healthcare begin right now, not in four years.”

Estella Chatman, 67, of Eustis, whose daughter snapped a photo of the typewritten sign, sent the picture to U.S. Rep. Alan Grayson, the Orlando Democrat who riled Republicans last year when he characterized the GOP’s idea of health care as, “If you get sick, America … Die quickly.”

Chatman said she heard about the sign from a friend referred to Cassell after his physician recently died. She said her friend did not want to speak to a reporter but was dismayed by Cassell’s sign.

“He’s going to find another doctor,” she said.

Cassell may be walking a thin line between his right to free speech and his professional obligation, said William Allen, professor of bioethics, law and medical professionalism at the University of Florida’s College of Medicine.

Allen said doctors cannot refuse patients on the basis of race, gender, religion, sexual orientation or disability, but political preference is not one of the legally protected categories specified in civil-rights law. By insisting he does not quiz his patients about their politics and has not turned away patients based on their vote, the doctor is “trying to hold onto the nub of his ethical obligation,” Allen said.

“But this is pushing the limit,” he said.

Cassell, who has practiced medicine in GOP-dominated Lake County since 1988, said he doesn’t quiz his patients about their politics, but he also won’t hide his disdain for the bill Obama signed and the lawmakers who passed it.

In his waiting room, Cassell also has provided his patients with photocopies of a health-care timeline produced by Republican leaders that outlines “major provisions” in the health-care package. The doctor put a sign above the stack of copies that reads: “This is what the morons in Washington have done to your health care. Take one, read it and vote out anyone who voted for it.”

Cassell, whose lawyer wife, Leslie Campione, has declared herself a Republican candidate for Lake County commissioner, said three patients have complained, but most have been “overwhelmingly supportive” of his position.

“They know it’s not good for them,” he said.

Cassell, who previously served as chief of surgery at Florida Hospital Waterman in Tavares, said a patient’s politics would not affect his care for them, although he said he would prefer not to treat people who support the president.

“I can at least make a point,” he said.

The notice on Cassell’s office door could cause some patients to question his judgment or fret about the care they might receive if they don’t share his political views, Allen said. He said doctors are wise to avoid public expressions that can affect the physician-patient relationship.

Erin VanSickle, spokeswoman for the Florida Medical Association, would not comment specifically.

But she noted in an e-mail to the Sentinel that “physicians are extended the same rights to free speech as every other citizen in the United States.”

The outspoken Grayson described Cassell’s sign as “ridiculous.”

“I’m disgusted,” he said. “Maybe he thinks the Hippocratic Oath says, ‘Do no good.’ If this is the face of the right wing in America, it’s the face of cruelty. … Why don’t they change the name of the Republican Party to the Sore Loser Party?”

The proportion of Americans who can’t find work is likely to “remain elevated for an extended period,” Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner, White House budget director Peter Orszag and Christina Romer, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, said in a joint statement. The officials said unemployment may even rise “slightly” over the next few months as discouraged workers start job-hunting again.

“We do not expect further declines in unemployment this year,” the officials said in testimony prepared for the House Appropriations Committee. They predicted the economy would add about 100,000 jobs a month on average — not enough to bring the jobless rate down substantially.

Today’s projections are in line with the 10 percent average unemployment forecast for this year in last month’s budget plan. Christopher Rupkey, chief financial economist at Bank of Tokyo Mitsubishi UFJ Ltd. in New York, said the administration’s language risks damping expectations for a recovery.

“They need to work on the message, and right now the message is that there is not a lot to be hopeful about,” Rupkey said. “Warning about a slow jobless recovery can help make it a reality.”

Growth Outlook

Geithner, Orszag and Romer reiterated the administration’s forecast that the economy would grow 3 percent this year, as measured by comparing fourth quarter growth in gross domestic product. Growth is projected to rise to 4.3 percent in 2011 and 2012, and inflation probably will remain low, they said.

“The worst now appears to be behind us,” the officials said. “However, the country faces significant and ongoing challenges: high unemployment, the need to build a new and stable foundation for prosperity in the years and decades ahead, and a medium- and long-term fiscal situation that could ultimately undermine future job creation and economic growth.”

The three urged Congress to pass Obama Administration job stimulus proposals including extended unemployment benefits, aid to state and local governments and tax breaks for businesses that hire new workers.

They argued tax benefits for businesses that add new workers would have a large impact in the early stages of an economic recovery.

‘Particularly Effective’

“The current situation — where for many firms the question is not whether to hire but when — is one that may make such programs particularly effective,” they said.

The officials said projected federal budget deficits, which the administration forecasts at more than $1.5 trillion for 2011 and over $751 billion for 2015, “remain undesirably high.”

“Deficits matter. Ours are too high; they are unsustainable,” Geithner said during testimony. “The American people, along with investors around the world, need to have more confidence in our ability to bring them down over time.”

The officials put the greatest blame for the high budget deficits on “years of poor decisions” during the administration of George W. Bush, citing enactment of the Medicare prescription drug benefit and income-tax cuts without corresponding budget savings to pay for them.

“If these two policies had been paid for, projected deficits — without any further deficit reduction — would be about 2 percent of GDP per year by the middle of the decade, and we would have been on a sustainable medium-term fiscal course,” they said.

Backtracking on a firm and fast campaign promise, President Barack Obama now says he is “agnostic” about raising taxes on households making under $250,000 a year, including the idea in the general tool bag needed to lower the nation’s crippling deficit.

In an interview with Bloomberg Business Week that hit newsstands Friday, Obama declared that a presidential budget commission needs all options of the table, including tax increases and cuts in such programs as Social Security and Medicare.

“The whole point of it is to make sure that all ideas are on the table,” Obama said. “So what I want to do is to be completely agnostic, in terms of solutions.”

Obama pledged repeatedly during the 2008 campaign to exempt households earning less than $250,000 a year from tax increases.

Over the course of time, the White House press secretary Robert Gibbs re-emphasized the president’s pledge, including when White House economic adviser Lawrence Summers and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner were mulling new taxes on the middle class last summer.

Obama also stated in the Bloomberg interview that he believes that limiting the agenda of any bipartisan advisory commission would cripple it from the start.

“What I can’t do is to set the thing up where a whole bunch of things are off the table,” Obama said. “Some would say we can’t look at entitlements. There are going to be some that say we can’t look at taxes, and pretty soon, you just can’t solve the problem.”

The Bloomberg report noted that the middle class would be the likely target of tax increases, because the administration’s budget already has targeted Americans making more than $200,000 with its proposed $970 billion tax increase over the next decade.

That increase is a product of not extending former President George W. Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy beyond 2010.

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