Money and Financial Business

A week ago I bought ACAS. American Capital is an equity partner in management and employee buyouts ; provides debt financing for buyouts led by private equity firms; and provides capital to private and public companies. I know that it is not a growth stock but low and steady wins the race in the long run. Currently they are paying 8.6% dividend and have and excellent DRIP program. They give you a 5% discount on the stock for Reinvested money.

My short term goal is to accumulate 50k by January 29 regardless of the market. I plan to get married in March or April of next year so I want to reach this milestone while I am still single. I have approx. 39,300 in my 401K and Roth accounts. I just increased my contributions to my 401k to 15% and am $750 away from maxing my ROTH. I know its a lofty goal but I think that if I sacrifice now I will not have to do it when I have a mortgage payment, a wife and a couple of kids. What's your short term goal?

Google's new Reader is a vast improvement. I think I may give up on Bloglines. I particularly like the ability to flag things I've read to show up in the box on the left (below my profile). I can even set up different sharing lists for each blog (if you're here, you probably don't care about the latest in knitting). What's missing is the ability to search your feeds. And, if you run out of things to read you end up here.

Yesterday I read this post over at Financial Rounds. Of course, I had to check out the Piled Higher and Deeper archives -- great stuff! Here's one of my favorites. And another.

Is it time to start locking in your CD's? The general opinion is that the FED might do a rate cut during the first quarter of next year. Emigrant just dropped their rate, this may be a sign of what to expect from other rate leaders. I received an e-mail that said that effective September 30, 2006 the rate will drop to 5.05%. Bad news for all Emigrant Savers.

By: Phyllis Feinberg, MARHedge Published: August 14, 2006 This article (reprinted below with permission from the publisher, MARHedge) covers a number of recent portable alpha transactions from Pennsylvania Employees’ Retirement Fund and The World Bank to Iowa’s Public Employees’ Pension and the Desert States United Food and Commercial Workers Local 99.  Critics often charge that portable alpha is really [...]

By: Pensions & Investments Online Published: September 28, 2006 The San Diego County Employees’ Retirement Association has submitted a redemption request to you-know-who.  But at the same time, they continue to allocate to their highly regarded “alpha engine”.  A vote of confidence for portable alpha that illustrates it’s not just about investing in hedge funds as an asset [...]

By: John Mauldin Published: May 9, 2004 Alpha Male just came across this little ditty from the prophet-cum-best-selling-author John Mauldin.  In his weekly newsletter, Mauldin refers to a panel he moderated in the spring of 2004 involving several high profile financial speakers.  Panelist Mark Finn, CEO of Vantage Consulting, delivered what Mauldin calls a “blitzkrieg of investment wisdom [...]

I have been bad about updating my blog, but I have been updating my payments. Slow and steady wins the race I guess. I refuse to give up or give in. It's not in my nature. I do believe in moving on when the time is right though and I'm currently looking for another job. I have found that if I don't have to, I can no longer wait until December.

I have been hearing a lot about the cost of college and the amount of debt that students are graduating from school with and how this is affecting their finances throughout life. What I find is amazing is that anyone reading this can follow my plan and have their entire college education paid for (or at least a huge portion of it) with very little time or effort. This is my simple plan that has been working wonderfully for me and I believe can work for anyone to create a nice college nest egg by the time you're eighteen years old.

This month I will make over $200 in advertising and I expect to continue to earn that much for the foreseeable future (and in fact believe it will grow as time goes on). Even if it doesn't increase any more, nobody gives another college funding gift to me and I don't earn a cent of interest in the next 17 years, I'll still have about $45,000 for college when it's time for me to go. With interest, increased earnings and gifts from family and friends, I expect to have well over $100,000. The great thing is that anyone of you can have it too if you do the following simple steps:

As soon as you know you're going to exist in this world, start a blog (I consider myself a late starter at 4 months). This doesn't cost a penny if you do like have done and begin the blog on a free service. For long term, you might want to consider getting your own domain (something that I'm considering at the moment), but this is certainly not necessary at the beginning.

Choose a topic to blog about in addition to being a baby. The topic should be one that both you and the person that will be helping you (you may need a bit of help until you get your hand / eye / typing coordination down) enjoy so that the blog will be updated on a fairly regular basis. Then simply start blogging about you and get your opinion out into the blogoshere.

Once the blog is set up, take some time to place ads such a google adsense on your blog. Earmark any money earned through this advertisement medium to go directly toward your college fund. Also set up an area in your sidebar where you can sell advertising text links to advertisers.

Find blogs that you enjoy reading and that have a similar topic to yours and trade links with them if possible. This will help people know that your blog exists and help it get better indexed in search engines.

These are the basics to getting your blog off the ground and putting in place a system where you can begin to earn a fair amount in advertising that will go toward your college fund. It is also a wonderful place to update family and friends on what you're up to and the things you're thinking about.

In addition to setting up the blog to help with college expenses, I would also highly recommend taking the following steps to help increase your college fund even more.

Tell all family and friends that what you really want for special occasions such as birthdays and at Christmas is a small monetary donation for your college fund.

As you outgrow your baby things, have your parents sell them through Craigslist or on eBay and have all earnings from them go toward your college fund.

Sign up for programs like Upromise that will give you free money toward your college education for everyday purchases you make.

Take advantage of all the free and discounted things that manufacturers give to babies and place the savings into your college fund.

By: Lex Huberts, Standish Mellon Asset Management Published: Fall 2004, Journal of Investing This paper does an excellent job of covering the many flavours of alpha-centric investing.  It also provides a number of hypothetical mathematical examples of portable alpha. Including the following: “Suppose a plan has a very talented Japanese stock selector who is considered very likely to [...]

By: Justin Fox, Fortune Magazine Published: June 16, 2003 This article is several years old, but provides some interesting historical context to the current paradigm shift in portfolio management.  From William Sharpe, to Barr Rosenberg’s “Barr’s Bionic Betas” (eventually renamed BARRA…where was that corporate branding firm when he really needed them?), to Ronald Kahn and the triple Ph.D.’s at Barclays, this makes [...]

As we are nearing the end of 2006, we find housing inventory at record levels and interest rates holding steady just above 6%, down nearly 1/2 percent from its highs this summer.  This has placed buyers in an excellent position to find  the perfect home and cash in on what are still historically low interest rates.

Cheryl Stuntebeck, Edina Realty Mortgage, had this to say about the mortgage market:
“While interest rates are .75% higher than they were at their lows in 2005, the current 6.1875% rate on a 30 year  fixed mortgage is still about 1% lower than the 10 year average.  Many industry analysts speculate that rates will slowly climb higher in 2007, making it prudent to lock in a purchase now.”

She also posed the following comparison:
“If a buyer purchases an average-priced home today, $285,000, with 20% down payment their total monthly payment would be around $1700.  If that same buyer buys the same home when rates are .5% higher, their monthly payment would be  around $1800, an increase of $100 per month.  To put it another way, if rates were to climb .5% that buyer would have approximately $16,000 less buying power at the same monthly payment.”

Earlier this year many sellers were not willing to accept that the marketplace dynamics had changed and that it had become a buyer’s market.  Fast forward a few months and many of those sellers still have their homes for sale today.   Most of them have had to reduce their price one, two or even three times.

Today most sellers understand that we’re in a buyer’s market and are pricing their homes more appropriately; understanding that they need to be willing to make some concessions to the buyer to get their home sold.  This can be  simply taking an offer under asking price or paying the buyer’s closing costs, or can get more creative with the seller paying down the interest rate on their mortgage, prepaying townhome/condo association dues, escrowing money for  new carpet, etc.

So Buyers: by taking advantage of the market today, you can save both on the purchase price and the interest rate while also taking advantage of the largest selection of homes ever available.

A CIO magazine blogger posted an informal review of the Suntec City Wi-Fi network created for the IMF/World Bank meetings. I previously posted on the economic inefficiency of the network here. Below is part of the review.

Accessing the Wireless@SG network was a breeze while seated outside a cafe in CityLink Mall. My search for a Wi-Fi connection turned up five access points within range, four of which were labeled "Wireless@SG." Once I had selected a Wireless@SG access point and connected, I opened my browser and found the welcome screen, which requires users to first agree to a set of terms and conditions before they can get online.

My expectations were high. After all, the IDA Web site promised Wireless@SG offers connection speeds up to 512K bps (bits per second), depending on the number of users accessing the network.

An informal test showed I could access U.S. Web sites at speeds of 150K bps, not quite the maximum promised but more than adequate for Web surfing and checking e-mails. That speed also matched the network connection of my laptop’s 3G (third-generation) data card when tested from the same location.

The Wireless@SG connection was fast enough for YouTube, allowing me to watch a video clip from "The Colbert Report." Similarly, I was able to call my Tokyo colleague using Skype’s SkypeOut service. However, the call volume on my side was low -- a common problem I have observed with SkypeOut -- and, amidst the noise of the busy shopping mall, made it difficult for me to hear. In the end, I gave up on SkypeOut and used my cell phone to finish the call.

At one point, my computer was dropped from the Wireless@SG access point, forcing me to reconnect. But once again the process was painless and within seconds I was online once more.

Well - its out here

am guessing that its indicators of competitiveness, rather than actual economic performance. This tends to favour nations with significant presence of liquidity in financial markets, stable institutions, stable macroeconomies, innovation, education etc etc

Tends to be the most wealthiest nations. But, doesn't mean to say those outside the top 10 are complete basket cases, or could take on the top 10 countries anyway. Studies like this sometimes present a bit of a monotheistic view of the factors needed for economic growth and development.

There seems to be a lot of reflection here in the transparency index too - most of these top 10 placeces are also the least corrupt countries in the world.

According to this work - stable government, stable macroeconomy, stable institutions, a decent legal system tends to improve competitiveness amongst other things.

My bugbear with all of this stuff is that it tends to ignore the influence of the demand side in actual economic performance. You can have great institutions, but you can always be undercut by competitors.

By: Barton Waring, Barclays Global Investors & Laurence Siegel, The Ford Foundation Published: June 2005, Journal of Investing This is an excellent article that debunks several time-honuored marketing pitches used by active managers - and by extension hedge fund managers.  Waring & Siegel say:  “We strongly believe that in the presence of skill active management can be successful. [...]

EconTalk contains "Economics podcasts for daily life." Each podcast contains a discussion between the host professor Russ Roberts and a guest economist on his/her area of research. The topics are usually quite interesting and are also accessible to non-economists. Here is a sample of what is available: the Economics of Medical Malpractice, Ticket Scalping and Opportunity Cost, an Interview with Gary Becker, the Economics of Inheritance.

I don’t know exactly how we get ourselves into this spot, but we’ve done it for the past three years. In the Springtime, we let our natural gas bill get behind, and they end up turning it off. At that time of year, it’s not something that we really “need” any more, so it’s not a big deal. The only thing that runs on natural gas is our furnace.

The problem comes when it starts to get cold and we realize that we hadn’t paid any of the past due bill off. For the past two years, this has been the case. We have to come up with a huge chunk of money to pay the past due amount and pay the deposit again. Last year, we couldn’t come up with the money until January. Somehow, we managed by using a combination of the oven, the dryer, and space heaters, closing off the door to the upstairs part of our house. Amazing, since the temperature gets down to 0 to 20 below, here, since we’re about 150 miles from the Canadian border.

This year, thankfully, we had a small enough balance to pay that the deposit covered most of it, and they actually sent us a refund. The only thing we needed to come up with was the $185 deposit, plus a $12.50 re-connect fee. It’s paid and our gas just got turned back on.

I want to stay on top of it, this year, conserving as much as possible and not getting behind on the bill. Hopefully, next year, we won’t have to scrape to come up with a bunch of money to get reconnected.

Life is good! We’re broke, again, but we’re warm! If things work out right, the money that I make from this site could pay for our gas bill. Wouldn’t that be nice?

The process for signing up as a new factoring client includes asking for current financial information. You should consider putting together a small loan package prior to seeking a factoring company, unless your company is a pure start up, in which case you will apply without this type of documentation. For revenue driven businesses, those companies going after invoice factoring would find it helpful to have the following material close at hand. The company Balance & Income Statement, Profit & Loss Statement, Current Accounts Receivable Aging Report, Accounts Payable Aging Report, and in some cases (but not all) a copy of the latest company tax return.

"The market is a place set apart where men may deceive each other!" Diogenes Laertius (Circa 200) There can be as many ways to cheat investors as there are swindlers, con artists, and unscrupulous brokers... and there are quite a few of those out there! When you invest your hard earned money with a stockbroker, you do so with a level of trust, and this trust is backed up with strong legal protections to protect your interests. Nevertheless, investment and broker fraud is all too common.

There's been a few preemptive news stories in last week's press about axing the SBS - claiming to report on the forthcoming announcement by Alastair Darling to trim down the SBS and devolve more enterprise support activities to the regions.

The times reports it here and is pretty scathing, calling for the SBS's abolition. The Times mentions that the British Chamber of Commerce said that the SBS had failed - which I can't find reference to. The BCC website refers to members feedback on the DTI which is positive and also points to high member buy-in to the mission of the DTI, but that's it.

The CBI's view of the SBS is fairly well balanced and valid although I have a few quibbles - CBI is mentioning/calling for the following:

- The CBI believes far more attention should be paid to boosting the growth of small firms - perhaps the most important driver of wider economic productivity and growth - as well as promoting start-ups

- SBS to have more power in Whitehall, not less - a lot of this relates to making government regulations more friendly to business, less bureaucratic etc, and to continue impact assessments on business of new legislation.

- DFES should ensure skills and education more tailored to what businesses want (been trying to get his for 20 years or more!?)

- SBS/DTI should work to simplify tax system for small business

- UKTI focuses too much on very small businesses - refocus on medium sized businesses

- Govt should reduce administrative burden

And what is my view? I hear the very few of you ask

The evidence is there to suggest that small businesses and new businesses generate a lot of new employment and innovation in the economy. Its economically and politically expedient of the government to act in this area. However, the SBS has always been a bit of a fudge. They have got some things right, especially things like research, and getting down to the main priorities for encouraging enterprise start up and growth, but they are a bit too remote from the real world of entrepreneurship. Should stuff be devolved to RDAs? in my view, RDAs aren't really fit for purpose either, so maybe not - it depends on the RDAs really. I think if devolve to RDAs, you need to build a community of practice, expertise and business advisor development at the national level - this is exactly what the SBS should be doing - being more of an enabler and resource to drive the agenda forward. As it stands, its too much like a ministry.

Simplicity in Kansas writes about the choices he makes in spending and saving. His observations are logical and refreshing. And he tells some great anecdotes. Just listen to the one about a pet dog and a new house!

Simplicity in Kansas is at http://simplicity-in-kansas.blogspot.com/index.html

Links to sites mentioned in the interview:
Frugal Duchess: http://sharonhr.blogspot.com/
Everyday Simplicity: http://everydaysimplicity.blogspot.com/
Ben Stein: http://finance.yahoo.com/columnist/bio/yourlife

By: Mathew Smith, eFinancialNews.com Published: September 25, 2006 Pyramis (a.k.a. Fidelity’s institutional business) has seen the light.  As eFinancialNews.com reports, the oddly-named goliath has taken a first tentative step into alternatives (note to branding firm: choose corporate monikers that don’t look like “pyjamas” when you read them quickly).  Is it only a matter of time before Fidelity Magellan becomes [...]

The U.S. ban on liquids and gels in carry-on bags has been modified.

U.S. Relaxes Air Travel Restrictions
NY Times
By JOHN HOLUSHA

Air travelers will be allowed to carry drinks bought at the airport onto planes and to have small amounts of liquids and gels in their carry-on bags, the Department of Homeland Security said today.

The new rules, which will go into effect Tuesday, allow travelers to carry liquids, gels or aerosols in containers of 3 ounces or less, as long as they all fit into a clear 1-quart plastic bag that can be screened at the security checkpoint. Drinks and other items purchased in the secure part of the airport, beyond the checkpoint, will also be allowed onto planes...

The decision slightly relaxes a broad ban on liquids and gels in carry-on bags. The ban was imposed last month after British officials arrested a group of people who they said were planning to bomb airplanes flying to the United States, using liquids combined on board to form explosives...

Security issues aside, what are the economic consequences of this change in policy? We should expect the retailers beyond the security checkpoint to benefit. Demand for drinks will increase and so will demand for carry-on hygienic products, causing prices and profits to increase. These benefits will be short-lived however. The property owners will charge a higher rent for the retail space as soon as contractually possible. When analyzing a change in the economic environment, a general rule is that the owner of the scarce resource is the one that benefits. Since the scarce resource is the retail space, not the retail know-how, we should expect the owners of the property to benefit exclusively in the long run from the policy change.

'Prices never go down' - How many times have we heard that one.
Ooops... dont look now because:

Existing-home prices fall for 1st time in 11 years


The collapsing U.S. housing market crossed another milestone in August, as the median sales price of existing homes fell for the first time in 11 years and for just the sixth time in the past 38 years, the National Association of Realtors said Monday

The median sales price fell 1.7% year-over-year to $225,000 in August.

Sales of existing homes fell 0.5% in August to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 6.3 million, the industry group said. It was the lowest sales pace since January 2004. Sales have fallen five months in a row. Sales are down 12.6% in the past year.

Realtors said the price decline shows the market is stabilizing, but other economists said the correction has a ways to run.

Meanwhile, inventories of unsold homes rose to a 13-year high.

By: Christina Grotheer, CFA Magazine Published: September/October, 2006 “I think the last five years have resulted in an industry-wide bifurcation of alpha and beta.”          - Alexander Ineichen, Senior Investmet Officer, UBS Global Asset Management Few would dispute that Alexander Ineichen is a titan of the hedge fund industry and a prophet of alpha-centric investing.  He was the author of UBS’s most re-printed [...]

Dog food cooking class, offered in Seoul, of all places!

(via Japundit)

Well as one gets older one gets more cautious! so I'll leave it for a bit before sticking my name on the blog.

I'm just in this new job, so will see the lay of the land before. There's no escape from controversy in economic development! well not really!

Did anyone who reads this go to IEDC conference in NYC? if so let me know how it was. I went to last year's conference in Chicago and it was a blast.

I am currently looking into economic performance and growth, and trying to get behind the academic stuff that's published, usually by geographers, that somewhat misrepresents economics. Its funny because I did both economics and geography at University. But the academic stuff on regions and cities isn't as good as I'd hoped. I keep going back to OECD stuff, Krugman, and Porter for inspiration. too much academic debate is preoccupied with supply side of economic performance, not enough about demand side. e.g. lagging regions for me are so much about insufficient demand-side activities (e.g. the businesses that employ people). Too much on skills provision - which in itself is not the answer. comments and thoughts welcome - share your insights
Ah well back to the reading.

Not much going on lately, financially speaking, but I have a couple small updates.

• Got a $50 check from Chase Rewards. Using it to catch up on some of my over spending lately.


• This week was my one of my odd checks during the year. Using it to pick up some more VFINX shares.


• Mailed in my application for BrokerageLink. Hoping to hear back on that sometime next week.


• Finally got the correct information on my batch of checks.

Friday’s WSJ (Sep. 22) contains a story that illustrates an important lesson about the combination of hedge funds and traditional long-only assets. The story is about the resignation of Tanya Beder, the head of Citigroup’s hedge fund initiative, Tribeca Global Management.  But it contains a deeper message about the rapidly shifting landscape of the asset management business…  “In the [...]

I thought it about time that I made another update of the site. As you can see the table below has been updated to reflect the many changes DRIPs have seen over the months.

I have added the following news plans:
1. Bell Aliant Regional Communications Income Fund
2. Brookfield Asset Management Inc.
3. Canadian Tire Corporation (CTR.NV)
4. Cervus LP
5. Citadel Income & Growth Fund
6. Citadel Multi-Sector Income Fund
7. Crown Hill Dividend Fund
8. diversiTrust Income Fund
9. Energy Plus Income Fund
10. Falconbridge Ltd.
11. First Capital Realty Inc.
12. Magna International Incorporated (MG.MV.B)
13. Morguard Corporation
14. MYDAS Fund
15. Precision Drilling Trust
16. Series S-1 Income Fund
17. Westfield REIT
18. Whiterock REIT

I have deleted the following plan because it was merged into Bell Aliant Regional Communications Income Fund:
1. Aliant Inc.

I have also updated the following plans:
1. Bank of Nova Scotia - MIN changed to $100/Month
2. Home Equity Income Trust – added 4% discount
3. InnVest REIT – added 3% discount
4. Inter Pipeline Fund – added 5% discount
5. Onex Corporation – removed the 5% discount
6. Plazacorp Retail Properties Limited - added 3% discount
7. Pulse Data Incorporated - MAX changed to $50,000/Year
8. Sunrise Senior Living REIT – added 3% discount
9. Vermillion Energy Trust - MAX changed to $5,000/Month

That's it for now. As always, if you see any discrepancies please post a comment.

Happing DRIPping,
Ken


Great prices on Brand New business books!important;" />

When it comes to what gives you the best return on your money and time spent researching the investment, it's hard to beat Ugly Duckling Investing - basically the theory that learning how to save money within your current spending will help your investments more than spending a whole lot of time trying to pick stocks yourself.

We've all heard about the trouble and Amaranth and I won't regurgitate the news. My point is not to rant about the fund but to deliver a short observation:

It's the same thing as Oil. Looking at the technicals I see absolutely no reason to sell here and all the (technical) reasons to buy. Like I said in my previous post, we'll see these prices again.

It's a strong buy signal for a trade and Amaranth's "blowup" just made it a whole lot stronger.

Cheers,
/Dmitry

If you’ve decided to get serious about investing or speculating on commodities, you must consider trading commodities futures. Derivative trading strategies vary greatly from being safe and stable to highly leveraged and ultra-risky. Inexperienced traders can easily lose everything overnight if they aren’t careful. Nevertheless, there are several advantages to the futures markets that make them irresistible to many traders.

- Except for precious metals, futures are the only way to directly control commodities. You can buy an oil stock or mutual fund, but you are really speculating that corporate earnings will increase. Oil could rise and an oil producer could easily fall in value if for example a hurricane wipes out oil rigs.
- Futures provide the ability to use extreme amounts of leverage. You can leverage your money by 10 to 1, 20 to 1, or even more.

Here are just some of the futures brokerages that provide online trading:

Lind Waldock

XpressTrade

Ethco

Anco Futures

Once you have your account open and funded you can begin trading. Each commodity has different futures contract specifications. The specifications detail how much of the commodity is traded per contract, when the contract expires, what the margin requirements are, along with delivery details. You can find all of this information at NYMEX

A futures contract is an agreement to buy something at a future date. A margin requirement is the equivalent of paying a down payment on what you are buying. For example, instead of buying 5000 ounces of silver today you could agree to buy the silver one year in the future. You would pay a down payment on what you are buying and your price is locked in today. If the price rises by next year, you would make the difference between what you paid and what the current price is at the time. However, if the price falls, you must pay the difference.

Although contracts represent an underlying commodity, traders rarely ever actually take delivery of the commodity. 95 percent of time, traders simply close out their positions in cash before contracts expire or a delivery is made. Investors that wish to hold a long-term position either buy futures dated far into the future or they continuously roll over their positions by selling contracts for the current month and buying contracts for the next month. Open interest refers to the amount of outstanding contracts at a particular time. For silver, there are currently about 63,000 December 2006 contracts, 13,000 March 2007 contracts, and 4,500 December 2007 contracts in open interest. This means that most people are placing bets on where silver will be in December 2006.

Today, the margin requirement for buying one contract of silver is $5,400. Each contract controls 5000 ounces with a value of about $55,000. This means you get about 10 to 1 leverage. Futures contracts are listed by their expiring month and year. For example, you could buy a contract for December 2006, or March 2007, or December 2007.

Futures accounts are marked to market. Essentially that means that every day the current price of the contracts you own are compared against what you paid, and equity is either added or subtracted to your account. If the equity falls below your margin requirements, you must pay the difference. For this reason, traders must have a certain amount of cash set aside to cover any volatility in the markets.

If you don’t overextend your leverage too far and are able to cover your margin requirements, then you will likely benefit greatly from a bull market. In above example, if you bought a silver contract with 10 to 1 leverage, a single dollar move in the price of silver would nearly double your investment.

Warning: Futures can be extremely dangerous, and are not suitable for everyone. You should only trade futures with risk capital and understand that you could lose everything. The recent $6 billion dollar loss of the hedge fund Amaranth in the natural gas derivatives market is just one example of professionals losing massive amounts of risk capital. Nothing contained in the Web Site is intended to constitute investment, legal, tax, accounting or other professional advice and you should not rely on the reports, data or other information provided on or accessible through the use of the Web Site for making financial decisions. You should consult with an appropriate professional for specific advice tailored to your situation and/or to verify the accuracy of the information provided herein prior to making any investment decisions.

If you want a full featured FREE Bill Pay Service, look at AOL. America OnLine (AOL) is restructuring from a membership model to a ad supported model. In doing so, they are making many of their services free to all. Their Bill Manager Plus is a full featured Bill Pay system, integrated with their Email. All you need is an AOL account, which is free too, just go and sign up for one AOL.com.

Here's some of what it will do:
Receive Secure E-Bills from over 4,400 support billers and bankers.
Receive and Pay Bills from your inbox
Automatically Add Bill Due Dates to your calendar
Track Monthly expenditures with easy to read charts.
Spending Alerts -- designed to protect you from fraud.
Credit card and banking alerts enable you to monitor suspicious activity and large transactions
Cell phone minute alerts allow you to avoid monthly-minute overage fees from your cellular provider.

AOL is also offering other free services, including 5GB of storage, free safety and security software, local voicemail, picture storage.

AOL is no longer the stodgy dial-up company with their own weird software. It is definitely bringing on the heat and is offering hard core competition to Yahoo, Google, and MSN. We consumers can only benefit.

INTRODUCTION
The most fundamental question you need to ask yourself before thinking about, planning, or embarking on undertaking or contracting research is – what do you want to know and why?
This sounds a dumb question – but – a lot of folks don’t ask this. They just collect information for the sake of it or do what they have always done, analyse the same statistics in the same old way. Or perhaps people try and collect every available fact or capture all available data no matter how relevant. Statistics and research can tell you a great deal about your locality or region. There is a lot of information available these days, especially with the increase in availability of online data sources and research. However, one of the biggest mistakes to make is to rush out and gather as much information as possible, as you will soon be overwhelmed. Its not good to be ‘data driven’ in this way. It is much better to be needs, or demand driven. Gathering and interpreting data and information can take a lot of time and resources. Quite often, research or strategy department budgets are small. Therefore you need to ask some basic questions at the beginning.
RESEARCH MUST BE DEMAND- OR NEEDS- DRIVEN
Take a tip from a professional, experienced researcher and analyst – take some time to build a sound reason and rationale for a piece of work. Talk to people – especially the ones who are looking for intelligence or analysis to help them make a decision. Try and understand the context and needs from other people’s points of view. Remember – if you don’t supply them with intelligence or analysis that they can use, your work (and you) will not be valued.
Your needs: be clear about
– The research question – what do you want to find out?
– What’s it for? What use will be made of the answer?
– Who is it for? Is it for a specific group of people?
The ultimate value of research is to help people make better-informed decisions. Sometimes its hard to determine exactly what those needs are if other people are involved. Often they don’t know about research in a particular field to be able to articulate exactly what they want.
For example, a colleague might ask you to implement a ‘survey on business survival rates’. However, what they really want is to learn more about what they read in the paper this morning about their local area having much higher rates of business closure than the national average. They don’t know much about research or how its done but they assume most of it is concerned with performing surveys. So this leads them to ask you for one. Rather than doing exactly what you are asked or told to do its worth going back to this colleague and asking exactly what they want to know and why they want to know it, and also what kind of decision or actions will rest on the outcome of this research. If there is no decision or money resting on the research, then you have to ask yourself if it is a priority. Perhaps it could be a theme of your next annual report on your local economy, or perhaps you could dig around existing data and studies to get the answers rather than commission an expensive survey.
DATA IS RAW, INFORMATION IS COOKED, INTELLIGENCE IS FOUR COURSE MEAL
The analagy is crude, but its true that data is raw information, and to be more meaningful it needs to be prepared and processed and ‘cooked’. However, you need to go one step further – to get intelligence out of the information – you need to analyse it. If you have cooked ingredients, you need to assemble and combine them into somehing palatable and digestable. It’s the same with information – you need to combine and analyse it so it tells you something that is digestible and meaningful. The food analogy is useful though – for example, you sometimes don’t need to cook a four course meal when a snack will do! Or maybe you have been forced on a diet because of government budgetary cuts. I digress.
Back to reality now – I tend to think of the following steps as cooked, raw, cooked and a four-course meal:
• Raw: the basic data that is generated by surveys of companies, individuals or is collected by government agencies and the like. At this stage, information is collected systematically (I hope – more about that in Chapter X) and quality checked/controlled (bad data or mistakes are rooted out).
• Cooked: the basic data has been quality checked and approved and collated systematically – now information is generated in the form of tables and charts. Things like crosstabulation and statistical tests or calculations can be performed. Quite often we use standard definitions for measuring phenomenon such as ‘unemployment’, ‘employment’, or ‘qualification levels’. The data is compiled according to these standard definitions. There may or may not be some descriptive information about the data.
• A four course meal: the tables are analysed to find out what they mean! This is a bit more complex than it sounds, but if we were looking at tables and charts of information concerning our local economy we might be looking at issues such as – how different is our economic structure in terms of industries to the UK average structure? or how high is unemployment here compared to the national average? We might find that high unemployment exists alongside high levels of job vacancies – we might ask what that means, and look at other data tables (such as migration statistics) to find out. Much analysis is about ‘triangulation’ – which is basically the cross-examination of different sets of information to ascertain a confident picture of what is occurring in the economy. Much of analysis is about gathering a set of incomplete pieces of information about an economy and seeing if any of these pieces fit together to give a picture of what is occurring. Or its like uncovering various clues about a crime. Some clues are circumstantial, some are red herrings, but some might fit together quite logically.
Of course there are some consultancies out there who could offer you a bit of fast food! But beware, too much fast food doesn’t do you good in the long run!
I have seen far too many descriptive reports incorrectly described as an ‘analysis’. For me, an analysis asks what the data means and describes the strength or association of causal factors. Merely saying that X is higher than Y doesn’t cut it as analysis for me.

More than half admitted to cheating. It's not just the business students --- 47% percent of nonbusiness graduate students also admitted to cheating. I wouldn't expect the percentage of cheaters to be very high in economics, not because the students are more honest but because the nature of economic education is not conducive to cheating.

Survey Finds Widespread Cheating in M.B.A. Programs
The Chronicle of Higher Education
By KATHERINE MANGAN

More than half of the graduate business students surveyed recently admitted to cheating at least once during the last academic year, according to a report released on Monday.

The report, "Academic Dishonesty in Graduate Business Programs: Prevalence, Causes, and Proposed Action," is based on survey responses from 5,331 students at 32 graduate schools in the United States and Canada, and is scheduled for publication this month in Academy of Management Learning & Education. The survey found that 56 percent of graduate business students -- most of whom are pursuing M.B.A.'s -- had cheated, compared with 47 percent of graduate students in nonbusiness programs.

From ElectEcon:

Did the High Price Reduce the Demand for Oil?

We struggle, year in and year out, to teach our students the difference between a change in demand versus a change in the quantity demanded, and we are undercut at every turn by people who say things like the following:

[I]t is becoming clear that the laws of economics still apply to the world oil market. High prices should reduce demand and encourage new investment in supply capacity, and we can see that happening.

The above quote is from Steve Polos, writing about oil markets.

High prices did NOT cause a reduction in demand, though. What happened was that time passed. The short-run demand curve for oil is steeper than the long-run demand curve. It is now and it was a year ago. All that has happened on the demand side of the market is that we are now seeing those longer-run effects, namely a much larger reduction in the quantity demanded in response to higher prices. the short-run demand curve has shifted, but that is in response to the passage of time.

The rest of Steve's piece is interesting and good analysis about other influences on both supply and demand; too bad it confuses a change in demand with a change in the quantity demanded

Surprise, surprise.  While money managers of all stripes extol the virtues of new investment strategies like portable alpha, pension funds remain skeptical.  Could money managers be trying to pull a fast one on the pension community or are pension managers hopelessly out to lunch? A new study sponsored by Citigroup and T. Rowe Price, reveals that portable alpha, hedge [...]

Our Texas house sold in about 24 hours for over our asking price. That’s the good news. [And it is, admittedly, a longer, weirder story than that. Always is, isn’t it? But that’s the major gist of it.]

So here we are in Minnesota, crashing at my parents’ place with our kids and our cat [our dogs are staying with my Aunt, since my folks don’t have a fenced yard].

Buying a house has been much more of a hassle than selling one. I thought that wasn’t supposed to be the case these days. Heh.

Just today we cut off negotiations with the first seller that we’ve been dealing with. They appeared to have not gotten the memo that the Twin Cities housing market is in the tank right now. Eight buyers for every seller, sales volume down by almost 20% over last year, and all that jazz.

So, until we have a place, our down payment sits in Emigrant Direct making 5.15%…

The recent severe correction in commodities caught many people off guard. Seasonally, September has been a positive month for most commodities, and many charts looked as if they were about to break out to the upside just before a collapse.

Prominent Wall Street analysts are calling for the end of the commodity bull market, although many were reluctant to admit that there ever was one. The heart of the argument is that an economic slowdown in the US and Asia will reduce demand for commodities. This argument has been repeatedly used to scare traders out of commodities over the last five years, yet a slowdown in demand has never materialized.

Investors must ask themselves what underlying fundamentals have changed in the last month.

Did one billion Chinese people decide they no longer want cars, refrigerators, electricity, and all the other modern technologies that we take for granted?

Did the wars in Iraq in Afghanistan suddenly end? Did North Korea and Iran decide to give up their nuclear technologies? Is the world now in an era of peace?

Did the US resolve its budget deficits and trade deficits? Will the $60 to $80 trillion of unfunded liabilities suddenly disappear?

Did the Federal Reserve stop printing more money? Is the dollar now backed by something of intrinsic value?

Did someone discover a way to print or manufacture an unlimited supply of gold, silver, copper, oil and natural gas?

Even if the US economy slows, what are the odds that it will reduce demand for commodities? Do people stop driving to work, heating their homes, and go shopping for food because the economy slows down? The truth is that commodity demand in the US is largely inelastic. And if most people aren’t buying food because they can’t afford it, you have more to worry about than the markets.

Just as two months ago, global demand for commodities continues to increase. However, prices have fallen sharply to deeply oversold conditions. The Federal Reserve is attempting to create the image that deflation is imminent, and prod traders into buying US treasuries so it can lower interest rates. And they are doing it just at the time when the risk of run away inflation is the worst it has ever been. If the housing market does indeed roll over, it will require a massive amount of monetary stimulus to keep the US economy afloat.

Every time gold has fallen through its 200 dma, with RSI near 30 it has been a great buying opportunity.

Every time silver has fallen through its 200 dma, with RSI near 30 it has been a great buying opportunity.

Oil is deeply oversold, yet still remains in its long-term upward trend.

Also Notice the RSI and Open Interest have fallen off a cliff as speculators close out their long positions and commercial firms close out their profitable short positions.

Some people are great about keeping up with a budget. I’ve heard of people who categorize and track every expense down to the penny. They know exactly where all of their money is going.

This is great if you’re that kind of person. Unfortunately, I just can’t live that way. If budgeting doesn’t work for you. Maybe my way will suit you better.

I should probably warn you that my method might sound a little harsh at first, but it’s what I’ve been doing for quite a while now and it seems to be working.

There are only three steps:

1. Invest for the future
2. Pay for the past
3. Live on what’s left

It’s that simple. Let’s break down each step and see what I mean.

Invest for the future

Read any good personal finance book and you’ll learn about paying yourself first. Part of your money should be automatically going into a savings account before you even see it.

This can be a 401k at work, or even a regular savings account. Don’t worry too much about where it’s going now, just make sure that you’re putting a little money back for the future every time you get paid.

Pay for the past

I’m assuming since you’re at this site that you have a little bit of credit card debt to pay off. Your next step should be to pay your credit card bills.

Some people like to focus on the card with the lowest balance, others like to focus on the highest interest rate, and still other people pay a little extra on each account.

I’ll talk about the pros and cons of each of these methods in a future post. For now, just make sure you’re paying at least the minimum on each account and you’re not late.

Live on what’s left

This is where most people have problems. “Pay yourself first” is second only to “spend less than you earn” in terms of financial advice. That’s what this step is all about.

Once you’ve put back a little money and paid all of your bills, you can spend what’s left. If you can’t survive until your next paycheck, you’ll either have to find a way to live on less or eliminate some bills.

I never said this was going to be easy, but it will teach you to live within your means. As time goes on and you pay off a few bills, it gets easier. Before you know it, you’ll forget all about budgeting.

With well over 100 articles and white papers now on this site, the editorial committee at AllAboutAlpha has decided to launch a sort of “best-of-AllAboutAlpha” page.  It can be accessed from the main menu (above).  Welcome to the International Portable Alpha Hall of Fame… New visitors to this blog will find this area a particularly useful introduction to the [...]

Dear readers,

Since I moved into the house, I have purchased the following things: 50" Plasma, large leather couch, Crate and Barrel side tables/coffe table/media stand/audio towers, high end sound system (where my reciever alone costs more than the most expensive 5.1 system you can get at Target), large Samsung refridgerator that has a really cool blue display, nice black large expandable dining table with 4 chairs that total more than the table, a sweet Weber grill, Elfa systems for 2 walls, and a few pickup truck loads of stuff (bed frame, tables, dresser) from IKEA.

:(

On the one hand, my place is about as efficient and functional as it can possibly get. Since most things are scalable and of fairly high quality, I don't suspect I will be buying replacements for them for the next 20 years.

Thankfully, I won't be in debt that long. I will outline my payment plan for you later today/this week.

- All purchases made on 2 credit cards (0% on purchases)

Well I am back, due to popular demand. Well I found someone had left a few comments and so felt duty bound to start writing stuff again (Thanks Neil Craig!).

Actually I found there wasn't much I could write about because I was working in a Regional Development Agency and in a more senior role than when I started the blog so found little time, and it was all a bit daft that I couldn't write what I really really thought.

Now I have left the RDA and am in a new job as an economist, still concerned with regional, local and urban economic development, and I will have loads to blog about. As well as being able to reveal who I am. Not that I am famous or anything.

RDAs - the insiders view

So what did I think of England's RDAs? well I could really go to town on criticising the one I was in but I will begin a lengthy session of blogs with my immediate observations:

- they get far too many tasks and have far too wide remit
- they cash they have can't fulfil their remit
- the political expectations and pressures far outweigh the realistic prospects
- having said that RDAs aren't as dynamic or creative as they have the potential to be
- to many have become public service providers rather than catalysts for change
- too many private sector staff parachuted in with no idea of how to work in government. RDAs are creatures of government first and foremost, and they must get up to speed with best practice quickly. No time for someone to learn the job from scratch
- too many initiatives are political pet projects, and have tenuous links at best to economic development

I have loads more. I once wrote a ph.d on economic development agencies, so you could say I can talk about it with a fair bit of knowledge. I will publish stacks more on this don't worry (as if!)...

By: Joseph F. Benning, The Chicago Board of Trade Published: July 2006, AIMA Journal Excerpts: “Plan sponsors can disaggregate the returns of fully funded investments into alpha and beta components to better align investment objectives with a manager’s performance. But implementation is easier said than done.” “While the tools for replicating equity beta exposure have been readily available for some [...]

By: Andrew Patton, London School of Economics Published: October 5, 2005 Various academics such as Luis Seco of the University of Toronto have argued that hedge fund market correlations (and cross-correlations) move closer to 1.0 in times of distress.  So the question of the “true” neutrality of hedge funds is important - especially when trying to short-out market exposures.  [...]

This is a big question and by the sound of it it seems to require a big answer. I am sure that with enough research of the sector's and the commodity's fundamentals, analysis of market order flows, comparisons to the past, etc., several strong, "big answer" views can be formed.

As a trader and by no means a well-equipped analyst, I will offer a small one:

December futures are trading at 61.70 and we are betting a large sum of money that we will be seeing this price again.

"Great!", you say. "You call that a view?"

Well, from my perspective, which has an extremely shallow, admittedly singular basis called "making money", it absolutely is. If I told you that there was at least a 95% chance that 61.70 was a price that we will be seeing in the future, would you consider that information as a tradable view?

To be fair, this really boils down to your trading methodology. One of the methods sometimes applied at Cadence is bottom fiishing (feel free to read my recent article posted at tradingmarkets.com that describes the strategy). In a nutshell, when an asset falls hard and fast after a prolonged decline (I am oversimplifying) chances of a near bottom being formed are very high. Obviously, a glace at the Oil chart that includes today's close will show a nearly perfect example of such scenario.

Now, knowing that the bottom is near, how is my trading view relevant?

It's less than immediately obvious. The easy part is of course that I am dead on right and Oil will go higher from here. If you believe me then you'll run out and buy a pile of Globex futures right now and enjoy your profits as soon as you decide that you've made enough. Now, the not so easy part is that I may be wrong, at which point the issue of risk management comes into play.

Well, here's the clue: I said that I have a high degree of confidence that 61.70 is a price we'll be seeing again. What I didn't say was that most likely, we'll be seeing it on the way up from below. Your profitability will be determined by how much lower we go before we revert to (and likely above) the 61.70 level.

This means that as long as your cost is not much higher than this price, you have a very high chance of being "safe". So, while you may not necessarily make money in the end, the truth is that you're very unlikely to lose much, if any. And, on average, you'll make ok profits.

Word of caution: there is that 5% chance that I am completely, obnoxiously wrong and we won't be seeing 61.70 any time soon. What to do?

The answer is simple if you reaize that this 5% chance quantifies an outlier. And, as all outliers go, the best you can do is cap it with a stop (just like you would with a long leg of a short options spread). Just keep in mind that your stop should respect the increased volatility levels.

Overall, I do happen to think that Oil is capitulating in the short term. I am also fairly confident that once it bottoms somewhere near here it has an upside of $6-8. But this particular statement is just for fun, because we won't be there waiting for the $6 profit to materialize.

That's just not how the game is played.

Cheers,
/Dmitry