How would you like to be in the top 1%? You might be surprised how easy it can be to attain this elite 1% status. No, I’m not talking about people with the highest income or net worth – those individuals who currently are the target of the Occupy Wall Street movement. If you’re not already there, I can’t get you into that group. However, I can tell you how to become one of the top 1% of the most effective investors. To be among the best investors, it does not mea…

The common phrase “there's no such thing as a free lunch” was made famous by the Nobel-Prize winning economist Dr. Milton Friedman. In economic terms, it means that everything must be paid for by someone in some way. Have you ever been invited to a lunch or dinner at a nice restaurant by a local investment advisor? If you think the meal is really free, think again. There will be a cost, which could range anywhere from relatively small to extremely expensive. Firs…

Over the last few years, the price of gold has soared. Spurred by advertisements on television, people have been predictably rushing to buy. It has also been a topic of interest for many of my clients. While I had planned to write this article for some time, I have procrastinated until now, because it seemed like such a daunting task. For one thing, it’s hard to define. Is gold an investment? Is it money? It’s even more difficult to place a value on gold. Will pri…

It was quite a week. We had just breathed a collective sign of relief after the debt ceiling compromise was reached, when the Dow Jones Industrial Average tumbled 512 points in one day based on fears surrounding the global economy. This was followed by the announcement late on Friday that Standard and Poor’s had downgraded the U.S. credit rating. While these are both unsettling events to say the least, neither should have been a surprise. S&P had warned that t…

In today’s volatile market, I find it interesting that lately clients are showing higher anxiety about their bond holdings than about the stock market. They hear that interest rates “have to rise” and bond values “will get hammered” as a result. The logical inference from these ominous warnings is to avoid bonds, but there are some problems with such thinking. The media and some professional advisors have a tendency to create a story by taking a kernel of truth an…