Greedy investors and savers who seek low risk and unrealistic returns face big risks of being defrauded. As the stock market enters its third year of declines and former stock investors search for “safer” returns, it is likely that more fraudulent alternative investment schemes will pop up, state and federal securities regulators warn. The recently resurrected case of fraud at […]
The collapse of the Houston-based energy trading company Enron has demonstrated that a seemingly benign 401k retirement savings plan may be dangerous to your financial health. Enron’s collapse virtually wiped out the retirement savings of many employees whose 401k account balances were largely invested in the company’s stock. Individuals with accounts that were once worth hundreds of thousands of dollars […]
There has been a lot of speculation in recent months that 2002 will be a good year for the stock market. Why? Because 2001 and 2000 were both losing years, and the market rarely has three losing years in a row, many pundits have argued. This argument is probably wrong on several counts. For one, the stock market’s current results […]
A retirement plan should be updated every year as your “real-life scenarios change,” advises Christopher M. Jones. Read the Full Article
We all like to believe there is a Holy Grail mutual fund out there that will deliver huge returns year after year without fail. That belief feeds into the marketing of mutual funds—advertisements that sport huge recent returns listed in bold letters lure investors to high-risk funds whose time is often past. It also provides fodder to the publications that […]
Mutual fund investors are hurting themselves by trading their funds too frequently and buying at the wrong times, concludes a study of mutual fund cash flows by Gavin Quill, senior vice president of Financial Research Corp. in Boston, Mass. Quill studied the flows of money into and out of stock and bond mutual funds during the 1996 through 2000. He […]
Over the past month the stock of Enron Corp., one of the largest U.S. stocks, has been virtually wiped out as the energy trading company unraveled. Although many mutual funds hold the stock, a few will be particularly affected because they held big Enron positions. Three Janus funds—Janus Two, Special Situations, and Orion—and the Merrill Lynch Focus Twenty fund had […]
