The Bull Hunters Guide

Welcome back. Today marks the end of our blog series on Asset Allocation. Hopefully, you’ve learned a number of vital skills that will help you in establishing a functional and profitable investment portfolio.

If nothing else, you should have realised the profundity of the principle that no investment exists solely in a vacuum. Rather, each one has to be considered in conjunction with the investments that support it or hinder it.

When a portfolio is assembled such that all of the investments support and advance one another, you have a strong portfolio that will see you into the future with great success.

If, however, your investments are not properly allocated, they will work against each other and bring one another down, resulting in a legacy of long term losses for your investment portfolio.

Asset Allocation Overview

Let’s briefly review on what we’ve covered so far during this Asset Allocation series. First of all we established the importance of analysing the risks versus the return for any type of investment that you intend to make. A proper assortment of high risk ventures next to stable investments will ensure that you always have a buffer of income protecting you.

Further, it pays to question the validity of the analysts at times. Never rely one a single method of analysis; they should be just as diverse as your investments.

Next up, you should invest with both your long term and your short term goals in mind. These goals should match up with your investment decisions accordingly.

Starting early is one of the best things you can do. The earlier in life you start assembling a portfolio, the more time you’ll have to develop a truly diverse assortment of investments that will serve you well in any situation.

Lastly, don’t just speculate. If you have a new idea for how to arrange your portfolio so that it will be better allocated, act upon it! You’ll never know how well something will work unless you experiment now and then.

That about covers it, I hope you have enjoyed the Asset Allocation series. Join us next week, when we start a new series on investing in gold.

Until then, happy trading!

Sean Rasmussen
The Bullhunters Guide
Universal Wealth Creation © 2004 - 2009

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Welcome back once again to our blog series on Asset Allocation. In this section, we’re going to cover the last of our tips on how to properly allocate your assets to ensure that your portfolio can survive anything the uncertain future might throw at it. In addition to a diverse selection of investments simply being safer, it also increases your potential for profits.

Remember, having a mix of safe investments gives you the buffer you need to really go out on a limb with those high risk ventures when the desire strikes you. Never be unprepared!

Take Action On Your Investment Plan

Our last tip for ensuring that you have a strongly diversified portfolio of investments is pretty straightforward: Act on your plan for investment.

Too many people who decide to diversify their portfolio get caught up in the analytical game. Because they’re suddenly looking at so many different types of investments (whereas previously they might have only been following one or two), they’re overwhelmed with a flood of information that they might not be quite equipped to process.

As a result, some people find themselves endlessly speculating as to which safe investments like bonds and mutual funds they want to take part in, looking at the charts for their interest and long term performance, as well as analyzing the five year growths for the stocks they have their eye on. This is practically a full time job in itself and many people never get around to acting on the investment strategies that they’re trying to build up for themselves.

So, be sure that you act as an investor! Take a look at the current state of your portfolio, and see how it’s split up between long and short term investments. Furthermore, make sure you take note of the real potential of each of those investments to make sure that everything is allocated appropriately. Then, once the plan is in place, act on it! If it’s failing, you can always change it later. But you’ll never know unless you try.

Next time, we’re taking to take a quick look back at all of these investing principles and summarize all we’ve learned about Asset Allocation.

See you next week for part 7 of Asset Allocation.

Sean Rasmussen
The Bullhunters Guide
Universal Wealth Creation © 2004 - 2009

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Welcome back once again to the Asset Allocation series. In this entry, we’re going to keep looking at different ways to diversify your investment portfolio to make sure that it can stand up to whatever the future might hold.

Remember, the more diverse your investments, the more likely you are to be able to survive sudden changes in the economy; even disastrous events like the collapse of an entire industry!

Start Investing Early On

Another key to being able to survive those disastrous events is our tip for this entry: start investing in your portfolio as early as you can. The sooner you begin to invest money, the more you stand to benefit from it. That much is obvious. However, this has some other unforeseen benefits that should be mentioned.

First of all, if you invest early, you’ll stand to make a great deal more off of the compounding interest that is hopefully associated with your safe long term investments. As a result, you’re going the most value possible out of your money, in addition to just simply having the opportunity to invest more of it in the first place.

Time Can Heal Wounds

Secondly, there is the matter that, the longer a span of time you invest over, the smaller each individual year will seem in the scope of things. If you only build up your investment portfolio for a total of five years, and two of those years are quite bad, you might well said that you had a fairly bad run of things overall. Those two years might represent a critical setback and the difference between a hard retirement and a luxurious one.

However, if you had been investing for a full thirty years, those two years wouldn’t seem anywhere near as significant. In fact, if they were bolstered by 28 excellent years of successful investment, you probably wouldn’t remember them at all by the time you reached retirement age.

See you next week for part 6 of Asset Allocation.

Sean Rasmussen
The Bullhunters Guide
Universal Wealth Creation © 2004 - 2009

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Welcome back to the bullhunter blog. This entry continues our series on Asset Allocation, and introduces an all new way to ensure that your investment portfolio consists of diverse investments from a broad range of categories and industries.

By having a balanced assortment of investments, you’re safeguarding yourself against unforeseen losses in the future, and working to make sure that you always have a safety net in case things take a negative turn.

As you know by now, a properly allocated portfolio consists of both long and short term investments. In other words, it has a nice mix of long term “safe” investments such as bonds and mutual funds next to an assortment of short term high risks investments such as “hot stocks”. But how do you decide just what that mixture should be?

What Is A Properly Allocated Portfolio

First of all, there is a “magic formula” that some analysts offer: subtract your age from 100. The number you end up with is the percentage of your money that should be put into long term investments, whereas your age represents the percentage of your money that should put into short term investments.

But beyond that, we recommend taking a hard look at your actual goals in life. Most likely, your goals are a mix of long and short term investments, just like your portfolio should be. Therefore, for each goal you have, it should be backed up by a certain fraction of the investments in your portfolio.

After all, if your goals are largely long term, you don’t need to worry very much about short term fluctuations and can continue to try your hand at risky investments.

However, if you need money in the next few years for some short term goals, it might pay to reallocate your assets such that more of them are situated in the “safe” types of investments.

See you next week for part 5 of Asset Allocation.

Sean Rasmussen
The Bullhunters Guide
Universal Wealth Creation © 2004 - 2009

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Welcome back. In this entry, we’re going to keep right on going with our series on asset allocation.

We’ve been discussing the ways that you can ensure that your investment portfolio is properly diversified in order to guard against sudden losses stemming from the unforeseen collapse of certain financial categories or even whole industries.

You never know when things are going to go wrong… so set up such a portfolio that it simply doesn’t matter!

Financial Plans

Today, we’re going to talk about the value of Financial Plans. When you deal with a broker or financial planner, you are typically assigned a certain financial plan that gives you a long term strategy for investing of your income with the end result of giving you a substantial sum of money to live on come retirement.

Sounds nice, doesn’t it? However, these plans are often in need of some intense scrutiny.

Even though many financial plans seem complex enough, and a lot of them even ask you personal questions before offering their prescription for your success, you have to be careful. Even though a financial plan takes into consideration what you’re currently making and what you want to spend in retirement, there are two major things it can never know…

Your Goals

The first is your goals besides retirement. While a financial plan might put you on track to having a comfortable retirement, do you really want to spend the next forty or fifty years scrimping and saving every penny, and never having any fun?

The second thing is any major external changes the market might face. It should go without saying that any good plan has fallback options, and this goes for Financial Plans as well.

While a Financial Plan is a great way to prepare for how you’ll spend your money and make investments over the long term, always remember that they need to be constantly updated to take into account the reality of the market and your present situation. Otherwise, they’re simply outdated advice that causes more harm than good.

See you next week for part 4 of Asset Allocation.

Sean Rasmussen
The Bullhunters Guide
Universal Wealth Creation © 2004 - 2009

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