Aside from the standard meat-and-potatoes equity and fixed-income investments that should make up the portfolios of most people, several alternative asset classes are available to individual investors.
Alternative assets are a good diversification tool because they’re generally not correlated to the stock market. This means when the market goes down, alternative assets may go up or stay the same and vice versa.
Large investors such as pension and endowment funds have been attracted to hedge funds because of their reputation for producing high returns. But it’s difficult to tell how successful hedge funds are because the historical data leaves much to be desired. Read more…
It was a tenuous week; but the dollar was able to ultimately hold its own through the close. However, just because momentum behind the earnings-driven rally in risk appetite has stalled does not mean that the world’s most liquid currency has avoided a collapse all together.
Hedge fund manager Jeff Matthews, who wrote “A Pilgrimage to Warren Buffett’s Omaha,” actually made the pilgrimage last weekend, along with 35,000 other Berkshire Hathaway investors.
In Matthews’ opinion, the most disconcerting news from the weekend was that the external managers Buffett has hired to manage Berkshire’s money are doing a lousy job. Specifically, Matthews says, they all lost more than 37% on the year — worse than the stock-market average.
The only reason to hire a money manager is to try to beat the market, because otherwise you should just buy an index fund. The fact that Berkshire’s external managers lost money isn’t surprising — everyone got hammered last year. The amount they lost, however, is. Read more…
A consensus has formed that the government’s massive money printing and debt-powered spending binge will soon destroy the destroy the dollar, crippling the remaining savings of anyone dumb enough not to buy “real” assets–like gold.
John Mauldin, president of Millennium Wave Advisors, thinks that’s ridiculous. He’s also author of the popular e-letter.
The Fed is printing money, Mauldin says, but overall credit is being destroyed. The government is desperately trying to bring back inflation, so we can lessen the real burden of our huge debts, but this will take a year or two at best.
So in the meantime, Mauldin says, ignore the gold bugs. They’ve been wrong for 25 years and they’ll keep on being wrong for the foreseeable future.
A consensus has formed that the government’s massive money printing and debt-powered spending binge will soon destroy the destroy the dollar, crippling the remaining savings of anyone dumb enough not to buy “real” assets–like gold.
John Mauldin, president of Millennium Wave Advisors, thinks that’s ridiculous. He’s also author of the popular e-letter, “Thoughts from the Frontline.”
The Fed is printing money, Mauldin says, but overall credit is being destroyed. The government is desperately trying to bring back inflation, so we can lessen the real burden of our huge debts, but this will take a year or two at best.
So in the meantime, Mauldin says, ignore the gold bugs. They’ve been wrong for 25 years and they’ll keep on being wrong for the foreseeable future.
A consensus has formed that the government’s massive money printing and debt-powered spending binge will soon destroy the destroy the dollar, crippling the remaining savings of anyone dumb enough not to buy “real” assets–like gold.
John Mauldin, president of Millennium Wave Advisors, thinks that’s ridiculous. He’s also author of the popular e-letter, “Thoughts from the Frontline.”
The Fed is printing money, Mauldin says, but overall credit is being destroyed. The government is desperately trying to bring back inflation, so we can lessen the real burden of our huge debts, but this will take a year or two at best.
So in the meantime, Mauldin says, ignore the gold bugs. They’ve been wrong for 25 years and they’ll keep on being wrong for the foreseeable future.
Forex Trading Outlook April 20th, 2009. Forecast for Dollar, Yen, British Pound and Swiss Franc. Also include a brief outlook of US Stock Markets in regards to Bank of America and IBM.
Hidetoshi Honda, a currency strategist at Mizuho Corporate Bank Ltd., talks with Bloomberg’s John Dawson and Naga Munchetty in London about the outlook for the U.S. dollar, Japan’s economy and his strategy for the rand and yen. The dollar has fallen 7.6 percent against the euro this year, heading for its sixth straight quarterly loss and the biggest since 2004 as the Fed slashed interest rates by 3 percentage points since September to 2.25 percent. (Source: Bloomberg)
The dollar fell the most against the euro in two weeks on speculation industry reports will show U.S. consumer confidence dropped to a five-year low and the housing slump deepened.
