MUTUAL FUND STUPIDITYWritten by AL THOMAS
THE ALCHEMIST by AL THOMAS MUTUAL FUND STUPIDITY For years mutual fund industry has been going great guns taking peoples' money and for most part doing a very lousy job of making a good return for investor. The reason I say that is that 80% of them cannot meet results of Standard & Poor’s 500 Index. The S&P 500 is most important 500 stocks of New York Stock Exchange with a few others thrown in. If you buy any fund that is not composed of this index you are relying upon fund manger to be able to weed out poor stocks and buy best ones. After all he is a “professional” and should know more than a monkey with a dart. Having been an exchange member and floor trader I consider it rather easy to go thru charts of 500 stocks to eliminate weakest 200 or 300. There are even services that categorize all NYSE stocks in 5 categories from best to worst if he doesn’t want to do work himself yet largest majority of managers can’t seem to make an average amount of money. By average I mean beat average performance of all stocks in S&P500 Index. When you go to hospital do you want an average doctor operating on you? Mutual fund managers are financial doctors only they are operating on your wallet. You sure don’t want your money with Mr. Average. Funds are luring you to give them money because they have a lower expense ratio, a famous manager,a specialized category, a socially responsible portfolio or some other nonsense. Why do I say nonsense? Because it doesn’t make any difference
| | Real estate portal attacked by hackersWritten by George Barrows
RealEstateGates.com officially announces of hacker attack that took place last Friday, December 3. Portal's Security Systems detected intrusion of at least 6 fraudsters throughout day using different IP-addresses but presumably having mutual purpose. Fortunately, confidential information on portal stood intrusion and remained inaccessible. However, mailing system used was broken in. Real Estate Gates uses mailer to regularly send information to its members who are subscribed to service. Users are usually subscribing for receiving daily news and articles, as well as information on portal's new offers and services. The fraudsters managed to bind their own databases and totally screw mailer's regular functioning. Thus, about 30,000 people having no idea of what was actually going on received fraudulent letters that were considered to be spam. But main problem occurred when they tried to unsubscribe and apply for being removed from spam-database. Hackers' rude virus attached to letters would resend all replies around their database again and again. Some of people received about 200 letters with "Unsubscribe Me" or "Remove Me" content. Many others would receive letters with some obscene phrases produced by those who badly wanted to stop receiving those letters they never asked for before.
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