Pensions - Retirement Planning Made Easy - Fixed Income Investing
Personal_Finance / Pensions & Retirement Mar 23, 2007 - 01:11 PM GMT
Fixed-income investing is absolutely essential to protecting and growing your nest-egg - if you know what you are doing.
As retirement approaches, your investment horizon shrinks. In other words, the closer you are to retirement, the less chance you want to take that you could lose a sizable portion of your investments. You want to more aggressively protect your assets from the stock market's volatility. Many advisors suggest that people at this point begin increasing the bond portion of their portfolio to 50% or more to lower their overall investment risk.
I've asked my long-time friend and colleague, Neil George to communicate with you about fixed-income investing today. During his first career as an international bond trader and investment banker, Neil worked bond desks in London, Vienna, and the U.S.A. He also worked in the Far East as chief economist for a mutual fund company, and was a rainmaker for a West Coast brokerage firm. At one point, he held more New Zealand paper than anyone on the planet.
As a chief economist, Neil helped Mark Twain Bank in St. Louis become the most innovative bank in America when he traded international bonds-and pioneered bringing overseas investments to American investors. He also served as chief economist to institutions like Mercantile Bank, Investec, and Guinness Flight, a British money management firm.
In fact, Neil generated so much profit in bonds that he made himself and his clients rich-and retired a multi-millionaire when he was only 34 years old. Bored with retirement, he soon embarked on his second career as a financial editor while also remaining active as a private investor-where, not surprisingly, he invests most of his own portfolio in bonds and other debt instruments.
My colleague's views are regularly featured in The New York Times, International Herald Tribune, The Wall Street Journal, Business Week, and Barron's. He hosts two radio programs; appears as a guest analyst for CNN, CNBC, and Bloomberg; and is a frequent lecturer at international conferences.
For 15 consecutive years, Neil has kept well above the Dow. In the post-bubble bust of 2000-2002, he earned 20.8% average annual returns. During that same period, the S&P 500's average annual return was -14.8%...and investors who didn't follow Neil's advice gave back more than $8 trillion in wealth to the market.
Moreover, the world's wealthiest people trust Neil with their fortunes. He serves on the boards of a number of philanthropic foundations, including his own scholarship fund. He is exceptionally hard-nosed, but also a fast thinker with a machine-gun delivery.
But it's not the stock market in which Neil created his legacy-size wealth for his family and clients.
It's in the alternative financial markets...bonds, bond funds, and preferred stocks-because it's here, and not in the stock market, that America's multi-millionaires and billionaires multiply their money at rates many times greater than the market averages.
Neil will level the playing field-and help you to make big profits in corporate and foreign bonds just like his former employers and other ultra-wealthy institutional and individual investors did!
By Roger Conrad
KCI Communications
Copyright © 2007 Roger Conrad
Roger Conrad is regularly featured on television, radio and at investment seminars. He has been the editor of Utiliy Forecaster for 15 years and is also the editor of Canadian Edge and Utility & Income . In addition, he's associate editor of Personal Finance , where his regular beat is the Income Report. Uniquely qualified to provide advice on income-producing equity securities, he founded the newsletter, Utility Forecaster in 1989. Since then, it's become the nation's leading advisory on electric, natural gas, telecommunications, water and foreign utility stocks, bonds and preferred stocks.
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