Alternative Medical Offices

Retail/mall medical services can be designed to accommodate everyday, urgent medical problems that may arise, where patients want to immediately know how serious their illness may be. The idea is to avoid overcrowded conditions in hospital emergency facilities. ERs are there for specific purposes, other than routine health evaluations.

Such medical offices can be made adjuncts to other types of retail facilities. Many already have been in operation. They are supervised on staff by licensed nurses, while overseen by licensed physicians. Doctor referrals are made by those nurses.

Different states have varying regulations, depending on pressure groups, who would prefer not to have this form of competition.

Results? A form of reliable, private choice, low-cost, health care coverage.(See the Earl J Weinreb NewsHole® comments and @BusinessNewshole tweets.)

Ponzi-Like Social Security

Everyone has heard of Ponzi schemes. The loose definition describes a scam whereby someone takes funds from an investor and skips town. But there are variations and degrees of scam sophistication.

Generally, a so-called money manager takes funds from investors and after a while decides to use at least some of the funds for himself. He pays off original investors with funds received from new investors.When everyone wants their money back at once, and there isn’t any to give them, frauds are uncovered.

But many schemes unfortunately, escape notoriety. They are never labeled. Take Social Security as the perfect example

It started off as a so-called insurance program, but never was comparable to what you get from a private company. There are no locked-up reserves. Active workers are simply taxed so that they can get future retirement benefits only from taxes placed on other, active. workers. (See the Earl J. Weinreb NewsHole® comments and @BusinessNewshole tweets.)

The Inefficient SEC and Your Money

their mad dash in reacting to fraud, instead of preventing the bulk of transgressions, the SEC does lots of monetary damage. They tend to pick the average, uninformed investor’s pocketbook by causing unnecessary expense of legal fine-tooth-combing, printing and mailing.

And requires such action constantly, perhaps to a far greater extent than is necessary to alert an ordinarily informed investor.

Just one example: The expense of having banks, mutual funds and corporations send out useless, expensive, legalese financial literature, that the recipients do not read because they cannot understand the terms the SEC has the senders use.

The only ones who can profit are the lawyers. If a dot or letter t isn’t properly crossed or is missing, the lawyers will sue the senders of that hard-to- read and comprehend mail. Again, at the expense of the poor mail recipients who never benefit from the impractical information anyway. (See the Earl J. Weinreb NewsHole® comments and @BusinessNewshole tweets.)

The SEC’s Fraud Prevention

The SEC exists to help avoid securities fraud. And it does, but only to an extent. Much of what it does is pure theater.

That’s why the SEC has had a poor record in discovering massive frauds and Ponzi schemes, uncovering them usually by chance, and only after they have already been committed and exposed. (See the Earl J. Weinreb NewsHole® comments and @BusinessNewshole at Twitter.)

Asset Allocation as a Good Investment Tool?

What do you do when attempting to maintain stock/bond asset allocation relationships in erratic markets?

The early 2009 bear-market in stocks had also been accompanied by a massive sell-off in bonds. The domestic market’s experience had been paralleled overseas as well. That was unusual and not supposed to happen. When stocks in the past were weak, bond prices had generally shown strength.

Therefore asset allocation did not help in that bear market. Using different asset classes to get a high return at a lower risk was unattainable.

Alternatives to conventional stock/bond formulas to balance market fluctuations are not sure-fire answers. But advisers love to recommend a variety with the aid of 20/20 hindsight.

Collectibles are not the answer either, in protecting against market downturns. because of a lack of ready marketability and poor resale margins.

Investors have been using combinations of gold, silver and other precious metal holdings. Still others, questionable short-term commodity trading antics. We see how erratic they are.

Over the long run, diversification among different asset classes has produced much higher returns, along with lower risk. (See the Earl J. Weinreb NewsHole® comments and @BusinessNewshole tweets.)

Timing the Stock Market

 

The financial media has a habit of commenting on timing of the securities markets. It cannot stop for a good reason. Securities-timing articles fill space in blogs, books and publications, over the air, and the internet.

Yet, independent research constantly shows that market timing never works consistently. One example: Mutual fund management companies know that in-and-out investors never do as well as their buy-and-hold, long-term statistics show.

 Reading a financial article telling how a rally trend in one security class may be finished, and it may be time to get into another type, should be a danger signal, not a buy opportunity. (See the Earl J. Weinreb NewsHole® comments and @BusinessNewshole tweets.)

Can Strict Regulation Prevent Financial Disasters?

The purpose of the administration’s attempt to regulate the economy amounts to a foolhardy attempt to smooth out the effects of booms and severe financial jolts and recessions.

The U. S. has repeatedly been through recurring economic cycles over the years. Other economies around the world have experienced the same.

The bottom line: Overly-strict regulation never works. The effort always has a short term goal, but, nevertheless, is used because it’s always a political measure to temper public unrest.

Dodd-Frank is excessive regulation that will not help. There is the usual political factor that overrides all supervision that the regulation affords. Easy money and the subprime crisis were what Congress and the  administration created, not the lack of supervision.

Simple bank guarantees and not having “mark-to market” accounting for banks in an emergency, would have been the alternative solution for 2008-2009. (See the Earl J. Weinreb NewsHole® comments and @BusinessNewshole tweets.)

Adviser Qualifications

The financial media covets financial advisers with its imprimatur, as a veritable storehouse of all valuable knowledge. The media invariably deems to put forth commentaries on advisor suggestions.

Somehow, the media manage to find these pundits from over 100,000 who ply the trade in the U.S. alone.(I don’t want to get into the subject of how these advisers manage to get selected for quotes in the media.)

But there isn’t advice from these sources that cannot be often questioned, especially when it comes to bonds, The quoted financial expert invariably never fully discusses the principles of duration when it comes to these investments. (See the Earl J. Weinreb NewsHole® comments and @BusinessNewshole tweets.)

Buying TIPS?

The financial media tells about how TIPS funds can legitimately inflate  yields. It’s easy to be hoodwinked into believing you are getting more than you are, while enjoying benefits of inflation protection.

I have never been a fan of TIPS. I have always explained its shortcomings on the return you get and its tax bites. And how you can instead avoid inflation’s effect on fixed income investments with proper use of duration principles.

The problem: Most investors and those in the financial media are in the dark about the use of duration principles. (See the Earl J. Weinreb NewsHole® comments and @BusinessNewshole tweets)

Sensitive Market Signals

I have found many scores of securities market signals in my investigation of strategies. However, those usually described in the media from time to time are not as sensitive as others.

The short treasury bill rate has always been an important one, until the Federal Reserve decided, in recent years, to keep money at basically zero cost. When they do decide to raise the rate, there will be an indication of actionable policy change.

There is always that question of sensitivity. For instance, look at the Misery Index, That is the addition of inflation and unemployment rates. Great for psychology but not overly sensitive for quick market action decisions.

I have seen the “Crack Spread” or refinery profitability-range index. But that’s seasonal and hard to gauge for investment strategy. An even less sensitive investment strategy indicator is the Baltic Dry Index or BDI. This calculates the cost of moving bulk raw materials across oceans and involves mainly those companies involved with ship rentals. (See the Earl J. Weinreb NewsHole® comments and @BusinessNewshole tweets)