Remember Ron Popeil and his set- it- and -forget -it Rotisserie Oven? Now you can do the same with your retirement savings. Life-cycle funds, sometimes called target –date funds or age-based funds, offer investors a simple path through the complexity of investing. All you need do is make two decisions.

Yes, by any yardstick, I’ll take a short, sharp couple of quarter’s recession over revisiting the pain of the Seventies. The problem is no one is giving you or me the choice. Stagflation, the simultaneous occurrence of high inflation, high unemployment and slow economic growth, battered this country for 13 years, from 1969 to 1882. [...]

If you think you’ve dodged the sub-prime bullet simply because you own your home and are not thinking of selling, think again. The housing crisis and on-going credit crunch will increase your cost of living, threaten your job, possibly increase your taxes and put a dent in that overseas vacation you were planning. Take my [...]

Many so-called financial professionals as well as academic experts debunk technical analysis or TA: the study of charts in an attempt to uncover future trends in market activity. The venerable Efficient Market Hypothesis, the bible in American Business schools, insists there is absolutely no value in this arcane art. Yet, over the last six months [...]

Overall, Socially Responsible Investing has taken its share of losses in 2008 but has faired no worse than the rest of the market. That runs contrary to its detractors who believe SRI, the investment strategy of combining financial return with social good, is an idea of the lunatic fringe. I disagree.

Traditionally, investors run to cash or bonds, preferably Treasury bonds, when the stock markets decline. They exit, waiting on the sidelines, hoping to re-invest at the lows. Sadly, that strategy has proven to lose investors more money than if they had done nothing. Yet, no one wants to suffer the pain of watching their portfolios [...]

“What is the government going to do about these gas prices?” a client from Texas asked me recently. He had just filled up his Chevy pick-up and it cost him over $70. Together, we complained and commiserated over the coming $4/gallon gas price. We both agreed that the McCain/Clinton proposals to cut gas taxes during [...]

The passage of yesterday’s massive housing bail-out bill by Congress was inevitable. Without it, the two government-sponsored mortgage companies the Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae) and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (Freddie Mac) could have seen a mass liquidation of their equity and bank debt sending you and me into a world of [...]

Given the amount of rain that has flooded our nation’s mid-west over the last month it may be hard to believe that the United States is facing a fresh water shortage. We are not alone. Water scarcity is growing worldwide and at an increasing rate. As it does food prices everywhere will continue to rise. [...]

All the news that seems fit to print these days is on the subject of oil. This week in response to congress and the public’s demand “that something must be done” to halt the inflationary spiral of commodity prices, the United States Commodities Futures Trading Commission announced the formation of an interagency taskforce consisting of [...]