Asset allocation is a critical component of investing success. Both research and academic studies show asset allocation to be single most significant factor in determining your financial goals. Allocation influences both the total long-term return and risk of your investment portfolio. Other factors such as security selection and market timing account for a very small percentage of your investment returns. Unfortunately, the most important decision to achieving financial success is also the least understood.

What is asset allocation? Most people confuse asset allocation with diversification. They believe it has something to do with making multiple investments among groups of similar assets. Ask investors to list the assets in which they would consider investing. Typical answers include “growth stocks”, “bonds”, “large caps”, and sometimes “international stocks.” But their diversification is limited to selection within one asset. For example, someone choosing to purchase technology stocks may invest in five or six companies – but all within the technology industry. This reduces risk if one of the companies should fail, but is useless when the technology industry (or entire stock market) slumps.

Asset allocation goes beyond diversification to reduce risk across all type of financial assets (cash, stocks, bonds, commodities, real estate, and even venture capital or hedge funds). Investments and risk can be divided further into subcategories of stocks including large-cap, mid-cap, small-cap, value vs. growth, and international vs. domestic. Similarly, bonds can be divided into subcategories of short-term, and long-term, tax-free, high yield, convertible, emerging markets, floating rate, and international vs. domestic. Multiple combinations allow investors to allocate their portfolios into a number of asset classes and categories.

Adding high risk asset classes and investments to a portfolio may seem risky. But combining assets that behave differently, or even opposite to each other, both increases the return and lowers the risk of an entire portfolio. For example, international stocks are considered “riskier” than domestic stocks. Yet, we often see the prices of U.S. stocks go up on the same day prices of international stocks go down — and vice versa. We call this negative correlation. Profits from one asset balance the losses from another. Combining international and U.S. stocks actually lowers investment risk by reducing daily price swings of our entire portfolio.

History demonstrates many markets exhibit similar negative price correlation. In a slumping economy, bonds vastly outperform stocks as interest rates drop. In an overheating economy, inflation helps generate stellar returns in the commodities market. But timing such events is unpredictable, and the variability of returns represents risk to any investor. Choosing to purchase only stocks, only bonds, or any single asset class increases the risk of losing money if that market underperforms.

The power of asset allocation comes from reducing risk while increasing returns. Reducing risk by combining multiple asset classes, however, is not a simple process. While each asset has its own unique measure of risk, many assets share similar price behavior (their prices go up and down together in any market). Combining such complimentary investments increase the risk of wild changes in price. Trade-offs between asset risk and expected return must also be considered. High yield assets typically experience high volatility, or large changes in price. These assets must be balanced by investments with lower rates of return to protect against large declines in value.

Successful asset allocation requires finding the proper mix of assets to balance reward with an acceptable level of risk. Proper allocation planning requires asset research and investment analysis. Fortunately, tools are available to assist the independent investor. Popular financial websites offers independent investors help with educational links and software to build portfolio allocations based on a survey of financial questions. For advanced investors, many books have been written to painstakingly explain the theory and practice of asset allocation – also called MPT (Modern Portfolio Theory). Casual investors can purchase mutual funds specifically designed to automate asset allocation based on an expected retirement date. Pragmatic investors can explore the many financial planners and advisory services that offer asset allocation portfolios specific to their needs.

Consider your options carefully. Each solution offers its own set of advantages and disadvantages. Pick a style that closely reflects your own. Just how important is asset allocation? It’s the single largest determinant of your long-term financial success.

Tim Olson

TheAssetAdvisor.com
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Mr. Olson is the editor of The Asset Advisor, a financial investment service providing proven strategies for no-load mutual fund investors. He brings 26 years of education and experience from Stanford University, Ernst & Young, personal wealth management, and venture capital investing.

Since 1999, Canadian authors Dave and Lillian Brummet have been working hard towards raising environmental awareness and providing a means for better waste management. Their columns and articles have appeared in publications across North America, in the UK and in various online E-zines. Their book Trash Talk, released just last August, has been embraced by readers and educational institutes around the world. The concept of the book is to inspire individuals to do their part for the environment by way of the reuse of ‘waste’ materials, frugal conscious living and reduced resource consumption.

Most recently, the Recycling Council of British Columbia recognized their efforts during the 31st Annual Waste Reduction Conference 2005 held at Harrison Hot Springs. RCBC awarded the Brummets top honors in the Journalist and Media Educator category for their work.

Visit their website (http://www.sunshinecable.com/~drumit), which offers a free service called Tip of the Month where visitors can learn reduction and reuse ideas. The site also has a large page of links to like-minded organizations where you will learn more about better waste management and can network with various organizations.

Dave & Lillian Brummet – authors of Trash Talk and Towards Understanding www.sunshinecable.com/~drumit

There are lots of decisions to make when there’s a baby on the way. One of the most controversial is the ever raging “breast or bottle” debate. There are many people who have strong feelings on both sides of this issue, and many of them will try like a televangelist to get you on their side. I’m not going to do that. I’m going to give you the facts, and share some personal insight on the subject, which hopefully will leave you feeling good, whatever your choice.

Scientifically, breast milk is best. There are nutrients in breast milk that help your child’s brain develop, and try as they might, formula makers cannot replicate these nutrients. Breastfeeding protects your child from illnesses because, as long as he or she is nursing, they are protected by your immune system, which is much more developed than theirs. Breast milk is very well tolerated by babies, and hardly ever causes gastric problems, and breastfed babies are less likely to be overweight.

But, realistically, the scientific facts are not the only things to be considered. Women who simply don’t want to breastfeed will probably not be very successful. Even some women who want to breastfeed will find it so difficult, that they are miserable trying to make it work. Some women will have difficulty making enough milk to satisfy their baby’s hunger, and some women will suffer more pain with breastfeeding than they can endure. If you fall into one of those categories, don’t beat yourself up. Your baby can do quite nicely on formula, too.

When my daughter was born, I was anxious to breastfeed. I had two boys, but one is my husband’s by a previous marriage, and the other was adopted at ten months, so this was my only chance to be pregnant and breastfeed. I read all the books I could get my hands on, and like a fool, spent a bunch of money on a breast pump.

Well, it turns out that my nipples are not exactly a matched set, so my daughter completely rejected one nipple. So, I nursed on the side she would take until my nipples looked like ground beef. Plus, she was an eight pound eating machine at birth, and no matter how long I nursed her, I couldn’t satisfy her appetite. Even with pumping from the breast that she rejected, she was always hungry. I made myself crazy from it, worked with two different lactation consultants and tried every trick in the book, but still every attempt at nursing ended in tears. After two miserable weeks, I gave in and put her on formula. We have never looked back. I was happier because I wasn’t constantly frustrated, and she was happier because her tummy was full and because her Mommy was much more relaxed.

Now that I’ve told you that story, I’ll tell you this. If I ever had another baby, I would try breastfeeding again. Every baby is different, and a Mother’s body is different with each pregnancy. I would try again to give my child the best from a nutritional standpoint. But, I understand now that sometimes it just doesn’t work, or it isn’t right for you, and that doesn’t mean that you’re not a good Mom.

Breast or bottle is a personal choice. Weigh the facts and the preferences, and make the choice that is right for you and your baby. Whatever you decide, you don’t owe anyone an explanation.

Sarah is a 41 year old wife and mother of two boys and one girl. She spent many years as a manager in the corporate world, and gave it up to be a stay at home mom. Go to www.infantresources.com now and get her incredible baby minicourse – absolutely free.

As I look through my various forum links and review some of my company email, I keep coming across questions relating to generating inbound links to increase web site ranking. No matter who you are, if you have a web site online you are always looking for ways to improve your link popularity. While most SEO practitioners will tell you that getting other related, non-competing, websites to link to you should be high on your priority list if you want better PR from Google or better rankings, most web site designers miss the most obvious way to get these valuable one way inbound links. There is a way to do that plus generate additional content for your web site at the same time. You can get those quality inbound links while expanding your content which will bring the search engine spiders to your web site more often. By following my suggestions, you will be able to kill two birds with one stone, and make your visitors happy while increasing your rankings and making the spiders happy all at once.

Everyone is an expert at something.

It’s true, everyone has many years of experience at something. Maybe you have been in a job for the past 20 years and know just about every aspect of it, or maybe you’ve been making paper airplanes as a hobby for just as much time. Either way, you have 20 years of knowledge about something that others could be looking for information to read on those topics. Maybe you have already built a web site taking advantage of that knowledge and are looking to use it as a means to make a living, or maybe it’s about a hobby and you want to make a living with that. Either way, each of us has valuable knowledge that other people might want. Why not take some time, sit down and think about your business experience or hobby, and then write some “How To” articles about it? If you have a web site that already uses that hobby, or work experience, then it is a good way to add content to your web site, and it’s also a good way to help you get those inbound links you need to increase your rankings.

Using the Knowledge to Gain Link Popularity through Article Writing.

Let’s say you have 20 years of experience with a company where the only thing you did was to conduct interviews to hire new employees. Let’s further say you were so good at this that it was the only thing your company wanted you to do. Because your results were so good, it’s the only thing you did do. Maybe your prospects always worked out and were some of the hardest and most competent workers your company ever hired. You could write some articles on how to interview job candidates to get the best employees, or maybe write articles telling job seekers what companies are looking for in their potential employees. If you have a web site for job seekers, or a web site for learning how to interview employees, you could then use the articles for additional web site content. It’s already a known and proven fact that the search engine spiders can be conditioned to visit your site more often through your patterns of adding content. The more often a site updates, the more often the spiders come to visit. The more often they visit, the better chances that your web site will begin to jump in rankings because it is viewed as a fresh content site that updates frequently and would be more valuable to visitors.

Some might think there are just some topics so vague or uninteresting that it wouldn’t be worth writing anything in that topic area, but the professionals know there are readers for almost any topic area, and no one topic is to be avoided because of poor readership. It all comes down to your writing style, ease of reading, and your credibility. If you can write gripping content that pulls your readers in and informs them, then it doesn’t matter what you write about. In the end, the reader will be looking for you and not your article. This is not something that happens over night. It takes a lot of writing and a lot of time to hone your skills to that point. It takes writing daily and forcing oneself to try different topics. It’s good to start out with what you like, but to become a professional and have flexibility, you have to write about other things too. Not only will this experience help you become a more professional writer, it will also help to develop your communication skills in the written format. As you continue to use better forms of writing and grammar, you will begin to write content pages for your site that rank better with the search engines. It’s a win-win situation all the way around.

Articles to Increase One-way Inbound Links and Web Site Ranking.

Speaking of those rankings, that reminds me of those one-way links I spoke about earlier. After you write your article, you can submit it to other places online which will post it to their web site, offer it to other web sites as free content, or both. Most of these places will allow you to submit your own information for an “Author’s Box” or “Author’s Bio” area which they publish at the bottom of each article. These are things like information about you, your web site, and LINKS you can add back to your site. There you go, instant high quality in-bound links without the need to add the other web site’s link to yours, no begging, no paying extortion amounts of fees for an ad, just good old fashioned content to promote your own abilities and web site. It’s the easiest way to get a one-way in-bound link to your site IF you can develop your writing skills and your content viewed as valuable to another web site. If you write garbage, your information isn’t credible and is full of factual holes, or your writing puts people to sleep, then chances are that your articles aren’t going to do anything more than waste your time. That’s why it’s critically important to get into the habit of writing often and learning the flow of your chosen language.

You see, the more you write, the more you train your ear to listen to the written words, and the more you learn what “sounds” right and what doesn’t quite seem to make sense. As I write an article, I am talking within my mind while I write. Yes, maybe I am a bit strange, but it works for me. I add my intonations and elevate my voice for emphasis, and I try to find ways to convey that in my writing. I’m no “expert”, but this is what works for me, and I have a decent amount of articles published, which means I must be doing something right. WebProWorld and WebProNews seem to like me, or at least my writing style or the topics I cover. Maybe it’s just my sincerity LOL. Hey, I do my best. I try to offer the facts and ensure that I do my research before I write any article outside my field of knowledge. Character helps to build a writer, and a healthy dose of commitment to the reader doesn’t hurt either, but you have to find ways to build credibility and trust. Without those two things, nobody is going to read what you write, and if they do, they aren’t going to be likely to click on links back to your site. You have to get their attention and compel them to want more of your writing. That’s what will make your one-way inbound links even more valuable.

The Most MISSED Secret to Link Popularity through Writing Articles.

OK, so now you have the knowledge to write articles and submit them as a means to gain valuable one-way links to your web site, what are you going to do with it? Are you going to sabotage your own web site by failing to pay attention to the link you formulate in the articles submitted? The more articles I read, I tend to find a common error repeated by authors all over the internet. Now granted, these are writers, not SEO specialists, but this is just an example where it pays to round out your knowledge in many areas of web site promotion, ranking, and design. The BIGGEST mistake I see authors make when attempting to gain inbound links is the keywords they FAIL to use within those links. You see, so many writers worry about branding their name. That works just fine for writers building portfolios for selling their copy writing abilities where name recognition becomes the search term a searcher looks for, but if you aren’t a writer and are just using your knowledge to gain inbound links, then you need to use your keywords in those links back to your web site. It’s so simple that most times it’s overlooked. Many will also use a company name as the link back to their web site. Many of my articles have ended up that way because I overlooked the obvious too. Nevertheless, by following this method, it is a sure way to increase your company name, or your name, but does NOTHING to increase the link popularity for the keywords applying to your site.

Take for instance Sanders Consultation Group Plus. That’s my company’s name. We provide web site design services, image and graphical art services, business consultation services, SEO services, and just about anything else to get your web site promoted, up, and running. I tend to take a page-by-page view of our site and link popularity. What I mean by that is I take various areas, choose specific keywords, and search terms I want our site to gain in rank popularity. I have recently done some page optimizing for our web site design area; incidentally, web site design has been the most searched term for web site design services. It corresponds to one of the services we offer, and it’s the most popular search-term people use when searching for that type of service. Let’s say I write an article talking about web site design. The next article I write on web site design will include the company name, Sanders Consultation Group Plus, but it will also include the term “web site design” linked to the page we have recently optimized for our web site design services. As I already said earlier, this is such a simple concept that most people often overlook, and it can be a detriment to your link popularity goals. And as we optimize each area of our site, I will continue to write articles based on the area keywords and phrases, and will then place links in my Author’s Box to link back to those optimized pages.

It’s a reported fact that one-way in-bound links are worth more than reciprocal links. However, for many web site designers and webmasters, the ways to gain them has been somewhat elusive. Many fear that imparting their knowledge will give competitors an edge over the writer’s own business. What most fails to consider is the number of people that start out as the “do it yourselfer” and then realize there is more work than they intended to do. When they find your articles, you become a source for them to get their work done without their need to invest large amounts of time on the project. This is where the benefits of article writing will pay off, especially if you gain credibility and trust through your readers. Even if a competitor does notice one of your articles, sometimes they can be so impressed and overwhelmed that they’ll write things about you, include links to you, and you still come out on top. I’ve seen it happen before. Someone reads something so profound that it changes his or her life. They tend to tell others about the change and how the change occurred.

Articles are a valuable way to get recognition, gain reputation and credibility while increasing your link popularity. Done wrongly, and it will do nothing but increase your reputation and credibility. Done correctly, and it can raise your ranking popularity and bring you added customers on top of the other benefits. Take the time to learn how to write effectively. Write daily and learn the flow of your chosen language. Write truthfully and credibly. Make sure to give provable facts while keeping the hype to a minimum. Use keywords in your Author Boxes and find highly trafficked sites to submit to. Learn to write in such a way that engages your readers’ minds and makes them want to read more of your writing. If you can do all this, not only will you become a trusted expert, but you will also gain increased traffic to your web site and leverage your web site income goals through increased link popularity and higher search engine rankings. At the least, it will give you plenty of content to update your web site and increase search engine spidering.

1. Start Exercising first thing in the morning.

As soon as you wake up in the morning workout for at least 30min to an hour. Studies show that working out in the morning has been shown to burn up to 3x as more fat as opposed to working out at any other time during the day. Here’s Why:

During the day your body’s main source of energy is the carbohydrates that you get from eating your meals. As you sleep at night for 6+ hours your body uses up all those carbohydrates as energy for various bodily functions that go on even while you sleep. When you wake up in the morning your body doesn’t have any carbohydrates as energy to use and it will look to burn body fat instead for energy.

For you to take advantage of this morning fat burning opportunity you have to exercise first thing in the morning. Don’t eat breakfast because if you do you’ll just give your body some carbohydrates as a source of energy instead of the body fat that you want to burn for energy.

Another great thing about working out first thing in the morning is that your metabolism gets revved up after your morning workout. Morning workouts keep your metabolism elevated throughout the day. An elevated metabolism throughout the day only means that you’ll burn more calories and lose more weight. If you workout at night you may still burn fat while you workout but as soon as you go to sleep your metabolism will slow down and you’ll miss out on all the extra fat that you can burn during the day if you had exercised in the morning. When you sleep your metabolic rate is always at its slowest.

Other reasons why its good to exercise first thing in the morning is that you get the workout out of the way, and working out in the morning will also reduce your level of stress throughout the day.

Advanced Tip: Want to burn even more fat? Add another workout to your daily routine 4-6 hours after your morning workout. Keep your already high metabolism higher by adding a 2nd workout during the day. If you’re seriously thinking about adding a 2nd workout to your daily routine then try to do your cardio workouts in the morning. Mostly fat calories are burned doing cardio at a moderate intensities. Make your 2nd workout of the day a workout with weights. Mostly carbohydrate is burned doing weight-training workouts. The muscle that you build from weight training will also help you burn fat. 1lb of Muscle burns 50 calories a day or 1lb of fat every 70 days. Not only will you be burning more calories, you’ll look better – whatever your weight is.

2. Eat Breakfast

Another way to keep your metabolism revved up all day long is to eat breakfast. After you workout in the morning as discussed earlier, just have breakfast and you’ll give your body the perfect 1-2 combination to jump start your metabolism.

Eating breakfast in the morning is what gets your metabolism started. Don’t skip breakfast and wait until mid-morning or afternoon to eat, your metabolism will run slower causing you not burn any extra fat.

Think about this way-Your metabolism is a fireplace that’ll burn fat all day long for you if you operate it correctly. When you eat breakfast you are basically throwing a log onto that fireplace to get it started burning fat.

Eating breakfast will help stop those cravings you may have later on in the day and along with working out in the morning, eating breakfast will also keep you energized throughout the day and lower stress levels.

Advanced Tip: Instead of eating only 2 more meals during the day like lunch & dinner, try to eat 4-5 more small mini-meals spaced 2-3 hours apart during the day. Remember the fireplace? By eating these mini-meals you’ll be throwing just the right amount of “wood” on the fireplace to keep your metabolism burning calories throughout the day. Don’t shut down your metabolism by eating big lunches or dinners, keep that metabolism of yours burning fat all day long.

Morning Checklist

1. Workout for at least 30min after waking up in the morning
2. Eat a healthy breakfast
3. Burn fat & lose more weight during the day

Use these 2 tips to reveal that six-pack, fit into that dress for an upcoming event like a wedding or reunion, or to impress that special someone. Whatever your fitness goal is these 2 tips above will surely help you reach them.

Adrian Bryant is a Personal Trainer and creator of NowLoss: The World’s Best Weight Loss Program. Be sure to check out his web site at http://www.nowloss.com. Adrian Bryant has helped many people reach their fitness goals in his 10+ years of personal training. Adrian holds a B.S. degree in Exercise science from Longwood University.

nowloss@cstone.net