Steve Selengut's Articles in Investments

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Year End Investment Ideas and Tax Strategies First thing Monday morning I'm going to march into my boss's office and demand a pay cut so that I'll be in a lower tax bracket next year. Profits are the holy grail of investing. Few people will admit just how infrequently they have experienced them or, conversely, just how frequently they have watched them disappear beneath the waves of a correction. Investment Scandals & Scams: What's Next! Plain vanilla fraud and theft are less worrisome to me than situations where the general acceptance of misinformation or "business as usual" practices allows inherently bad product ideas and blatant mismanagement to become accepted by regulatory authorities, financial professionals, and myopically gullible consumers. Real Estate Investing: No Lawyers, No Debt, No Plungers Real Estate investing is not nearly as legally complicated, financially burdensome, or time consuming as you might think. In fact, it is easy to add raw land, shopping centers, apartment complexes, and private homes to your portfolio without Brokers, Bankers, Attorneys, and a Rolodex full of maintenance professionals' phone numbers. Window Dressing: Wall Street's Investment "Circle of Gold". As if all of these institutional forces weren't enough, you need also consider the impact of tax code motivated transactions during the always-entertaining final quarter of the year. One would never suspect that the purpose of investing is to make money! Relax, A Volatile Stock Market Is Your Dearest Friend Call it foresight, or hindsight if you want to be argumentative, but a long-term view of the Investment Process eliminates the guesswork and points pretty clearly toward a trading mentality that keys on the very natural volatility of the hundreds of Investment Grade Equities out there for your portfolio building attention. In Value Stock Investing, Quality is Job One How do we create a confidence building Stock Selection Universe? Simply operating on blind faith with one of the common definitions may be too simplistic, particularly since many of the numbers originate from the subject companies. The Dow Jones Industrial Average: Failing the Average Investor To most investors, the DJIA provides all of the information they think they need, and they worship it mindlessly, thinking that this time tattered average has mystical predictive and analytic powers far beyond the scope of any other market numbers. It's Wall Street's rendition of "The Emperor's New Clothes". Ten Common Investment Errors: Stocks, Bonds, & Management Losing money on an investment may not be the result of a mistake, and not all mistakes result in monetary losses. Compounding the problems that investors have managing their investment portfolios is the sideshowesque sensationalism that the media brings to the process. Avoid these ten common errors to improve your performance: