More Stocks May Not Make a Portfolio Safer

By JASON ZWEIG NOVEMBER 21, 2009


Not putting all your eggs in one basket is the most basic principle of investing. It also may be the hardest to get right.

Investors have long been told by stockbrokers and financial planners that to have a properly diversified stock portfolio, you need shares in only 10 to 40 companies. Even the great investment analyst Benjamin Graham urged "adequate though not excessive diversification," which he defined as between 10 and about 30 securities.

As many studies have shown, at least 40% of the variability in returns can be reduced by moving from a single company to 20. Once a portfolio contains 20 or 30 stocks, adding more does little to damp the fluctuations in wealth over time.

Shop for Dividends in This Aging Bull Market

By BRETT ARENDS
NOVEMBER 22, 2009


Wall Street has rallied a long way since the dark days last winter. But there are still plenty of blue chips offering big dividend yields.

Screen the market for yields over 3% that are well-backed by earnings and a surprising number of big household names come up -- Kraft Foods, Clorox, Sara Lee, Sysco, Johnson & Johnson, Merck, BP, NStar, Verizon Communications and AT&T.

A lot of these steady Eddies have been left behind by this year's mad stampede for higher-risk, higher-excitement investments -- from China to the Cheesecake Factory.

It's a good time to remember that high-excitement stocks often end up providing investors with high drama and high blood pressure instead.

Dubai Debt Crisis

Investment Mistakes

By Christopher Davis November 24, 2009

Whether it's the Dutch tulip craze of the 17th century, the dot-com mania of the late 1990s, or the most recent rush into real estate, there's no shortage of examples of investors behaving irrationally.

In the world of traditional economists and finance professors, though, that's not supposed to happen. If investors are rational decision-makers, then emotion-driven bubbles shouldn't be possible. Yet human weaknesses can limit our ability to think clearly. Many studies of investor behavior have shown that investors are too willing to extrapolate recent trends far into the future, too confident in their abilities, and too quick (or not quick enough) to react to new information. These tendencies often lead investors to make decisions that run counter to their own best interests.

Company Hierarchy

Sounds familiar?  :)

'Greatest Trade': How You Can Make $20 Billion

By GREGORY ZUCKERMAN (NOVEMBER 15, 2009)

Even as the financial system collapsed last year, and millions of investors lost billions of dollars, one unlikely investor was racking up historic profits: John Paulson, a hedge-fund manager in New York.

His firm made $20 billion between 2007 and early 2009 by betting against the housing market and big financial companies. Mr. Paulson's personal cut would amount to nearly $4 billion, or more than $10 million a day. That was more than the 2007 earnings of J.K. Rowling, Oprah Winfrey and Tiger Woods combined.

How did he do it?

Oceanus Group Limited: Earnings Announcement

Oceanus Group Limited posted a 91% increase in profit before tax of RMB334.7 million for the 9 months ended 30 September 2009 compared to the corresponding period.