Don’t Quit Your Day Job – Personal Finance, Economics and Investing

Who is your favorite investor? Warren Buffet, Peter Lynch? Do you wish you had their insights? What if you could link your brokerage account to theirs? That exact concept is brought up in an article from the New York Times hosted on Yahoo! Finance: for a fee, your brokerage account can mirror that of an expert investor.

Welcome back to the table, emerging markets! As a recent Wall street Journal article points out, emerging markets are back. Emerging markets, defined as rapidly growing economies coming from a smaller base (but notoriously hard to list!), have bounced back from their lows this year. Are emerging markets re-emerging?

“Finance is the art of passing money from hand to hand until it finally disappears.” – Robert W. Sarnoff.

From the “it’s about time” category, I present the Supreme Court case Jones v. Harris Associates. The case was filed because a group of investors felt:

1. The board of directors wasn’t sufficiently neutral (the law requires 40% of advisors to be “disinterested”).
2. The fund didn’t disclose the advisers’ financial links to the trustees
3. Compensation for the adviser should be controlled by a majority of the disinterested advisers

As Jason Zweig of the Wall Street Journal writes, the Supreme court has no business setting fees. However, the disclosure rules on mutual funds stem from older laws. Is it time for reform in fund disclosure?

Not all of us have surplus money stacked up under our mattresses. But it isn’t very hard to believe that after careful budgeting and hard work we can put away some money for the future. When we finally get to this point some of us see many opportunities and are unsure of what to do with our money. Personal investing can be a very opportunistic option and can pay off greatly if money is put in the right places. We strive to put away money for investing, and then have no idea of what investment opportunities are available and which are the most advantageous. It is important to research different roads we can take before we get to them.