Wednesday, December 4, 2013

How to buy ... currencies

Many ways to invest in foreign exchange, but beware of pitfalls

Foreign currency investing is no longer exclusive to the world's most sophisticated traders.  

 Individual investors can now join a club that has been the rarefied domain of hedge funds, professional speculators and institutional investors. There are myriad ways investors can gain portfolio exposure to currencies, and many good reasons to do so.

As part of a portfolio, currencies offset the risk of stocks, bonds and other investments. International bond funds, like-minded exchange-traded funds and specialized currency funds are appropriate for most investors, said Jeff Tjornehoj, a senior research analyst at fund data firm Lipper Inc. A riskier route involves more direct investment such as buying currency futures. 

What to watch out for:

Currency hedges
International stock funds offer investors some currency exposure. But first, find out if the managers are hedging against fluctuations in the U.S. dollar.
Buying a hedge effectively neutralizes currency swings, protecting the fund in case the dollar strengthens and cuts into foreign-investment gains. But if the dollar loses strength, a hedge is a costly move that erases the profits you'd pocket from the greenback's decline.
Most international stock funds now are unhedged, Tjornehoj noted. But he said it's difficult to stay a step ahead of currency fluctuations with stocks because so many other investment factors weigh on a company's stock price.
It's also important to remember that unlike their international counterparts, global stock and bond funds can also invest in the U.S., reducing the diversification aspects of non-dollar assets.
Excessive risk
When considering an international fund or currency fund, check the quality of the portfolio's holdings, said Ihab Salib, co-manager of the Federated International Bond Fund FTIIX +0.47%  .
Exposure to more volatile currencies such as the Brazilian real or Turkish lira, or low-quality emerging-market debt, ratchets up your risk.
Novice advice
With currency investment options so readily available, it's easy for unsophisticated buyers to get in over their heads. This is especially true of emerging-market currencies such as the Mexican peso, Lipper's Tjornehoj said.
"For the typical investor, it's more akin to gambling," he said. "If you have some idea about why the peso should appreciate, then you're making an informed decision. If you are reading some charts and listening to blogs saying the peso is due to appreciate for unknown reasons, then you're not as informed."
Steve Sachs, head of capital markets at ProShare Advisors, added that would-be currency buyers should seek professional advice. Currency holdings are good portfolio diversifiers, he noted, but they're not meant to make up a large portion of your total assets.
Easy trading access
Several firms offer investors easy ways to trade currencies. Global Forex Trading, for example, will open an account for as little as $250. Forex Capital Markets, a retail trading firm, also offers a mini trading account with a minimum balance of $300 for those new to online currency trading. Everbank World Markets offers individuals highly liquid money-market accounts or a bank certificate of deposit denominated in a variety of currencies.
Chuck Butler, president of EverBank World Markets, said the money-markets carry a minimum initial investment of $2,500, while CDs have a $10,000 threshold. The products are mostly used by "high net-worth individuals and people who want to diversify a piece of their dollar-denominated investment portfolio out of the dollar."
Economic instability
In doing homework on the country in which you want to buy currencies, ask the following questions, Butler said:
"Is it worth buying that country's currency? Is it in good standing? Does it have a positive balance of payments? Is the government stable? What's the inflation rate?"
Also, Butler noted, don't shoot for the highest yield. "You have to look at the total picture," he said. "A lot of times a country that has very high interest rates means that that country has high inflation or there are other problems where they may need to have the interest rate high to attract foreign investment."

Sunday, August 18, 2013

Best retirement move almost nobody makes

Experts say more savers should roll plans into their new job’s 401(k)

When it comes to rolling over retirement accounts, a new government report suggests that job switchers are ignoring what may be their best option: Pouring savings into a new employer’s 401(k).

For many investors, the term “rollover” is synonymous with moving money from an employer-sponsored plan like a 401(k) into an individual retirement account. But it is also an option to move those assets sitting in an old 401(k)—or other defined-contribution plan like a 403(b)—into a similar plan at the new job.

New research from Congress’s investigative arm, the Government Accountability Office, suggests that paperwork hassles and a hard sell from IRA providers mean investors too frequently overlook the latter option. “It’s unnecessarily hard to do the right thing,” says Alison Borland, a retirement strategist at benefits company Aon Hewitt, which estimates that investors roll $9 into IRAs for every $1 that goes into a new 401(k).

  Investing pros agree that cashing out retirement savings is almost never wise. But there are benefits to both of the other alternatives: IRAs typically offer a wider range of investment options, while 401(k) plans offer lower costs, particularly if they are sponsored by a big employer.

Those cost savings can be significant in the long run.

Retirement savers in retail mutual funds—the type widely available in IRAs—pay annual fees averaging $101 per $10,000 invested, roughly double what investors in big 401(k)s pay, according to investment consultant Callan. Such differences can compound into thousands of dollars in lost retirement income after decades of saving, according to Callan’s defined-contribution practice leader, Lori Lucas. “I don’t think participants really understand the cost advantages,” she says.

What makes IRAs so popular? One big factor, according to the GAO report, is aggressive industry marketing, including sales pitches delivered through “educational” 401(k) materials and misinformation delivered by call-center representatives. Kent Mason, a Washington lawyer who represents retirement vendors, concedes some problems but notes that sales people whose tactics cross the line are not unique to investment companies. “It happens in all walks of life,” he says. 

 The report also notes that new employers are sometimes indifferent to processing rollovers because they must confirm that the money comes from another qualified plan. That means extra paperwork and, in theory, penalties if they foul it up. As a result, experts say savers often get less handholding with 401(k) rollovers than they do with the IRA variety, where vendors are hungry for new customers.

Those happy with their old employer’s 401(k) plan typically have the option to keep the money there. But those who want to consolidate their savings should consider putting in the extra work to roll the funds into the new employer’s 401(k), according to Kevin Chisholm, associate director at investment industry researcher Cerulli Associates. “It will be well worth your time,” he says.

Monday, August 12, 2013

Free Intraday Stock Tips for 13th August 2013

LICHSGFIN
LIC Husing and Finance   Limited
Action
Trigger Price
Stop Loss
 Target 1
Target 2
Buy Above
176.5 173.5 178.5 181.5
Sell Below
172.5 174.5 171.5 167
YESBANK
Yes Bank   Limited
Action
Trigger Price
Stop Loss
 Target 1
Target 2
Buy Above
304 294 313 326
Sell Below
292 297 284 264
JINDALSTEL
Jindal Steel & Power   Limited
Action
Trigger Price
Stop Loss
 Target 1
Target 2
Buy Above
229 221 234 241
S.Sell Below
220 223 215 205

Saturday, August 10, 2013

The hidden fees eating up your bank balance

Despite reforms, many charges are not clearly disclosed

The average checking account has 30 fees, a new study finds, and one-fifth of U.S. banks still don’t provide a list of these charges before a customer submits an online application. 

Bank account
Some banks charge as many as 50 individual fees for checking accounts, according to the survey by financial website WalletHub.com. “If you thought prepaid cards charged a lot of fees, you obviously haven’t scrutinized a checking account agreement in too much detail,” says Odysseas Papadimitriou, the site’s founder and CEO.
  Capital One and Fifth Third Bank, a regional bank based in Cincinnati, were the only two banks to earn perfect scores for transparency in the survey. Fewer than half (48%) of major banks had well-marked, direct links from their checking account product pages to a full summary of fees. Worst rated were the 20% of banks that fail to provide a list of checking account fees on their product pages. Among them are HSBC Bank, Huntington National Bank, USAA Federal Savings Bank, Sovereign Bank, and M&T Bank, the survey found.

A spokeswoman for Sovereign Bank says the group improved the clarity of its fee disclosures last week to make checking accounts easier to understand by offering “simpler and more transparent fee disclosure information” in line with recommendations by The Pew Charitable Trusts’ “Safe Checking in the Electronic Age” project.

For their part, banks say they’re working on increasing fee transparency. “Avoiding fees is often as simple as maintaining a minimum balance or using direct deposit,” says Mike Townsend, a spokesman for the American Bankers Association. A spokesman for Huntington Bank says it’s working on integrating its disclosures into the account products pages, and an HSBC spokesman says customers wishing to open an online checking account must first confirm they’ve read account fee disclosures.

However, the manner in which major banks inform customers about the costs associated with their checking accounts remains confusing, Papadimitriou says. They list different fees in different places online, call them by different names, and don’t always highlight the most important fees, the study found. Regulatory bodies have spearheaded some improvement, making disclosures shorter and somewhat easier to understand, Papadimitriou says, “but there’s obviously still work to be done.”

Consumer advocates say they’ve repeatedly urged regulators to require prominent and smart disclosure of fees online, and to offer downloadable bank fee data and easy-to-read bank-account-shopping guides. In fact, less than half of 250 bank branches surveyed last year fully disclosed fees to prospective customers on the first request, while 12% provided no fee information at all, according to the nonprofit Public Interest Research Group’s most recent survey on the issue, Big Banks, Bigger Fees 2012.

To be fair, many of these fees are only triggered by certain behaviors, like going below a required balance threshold or bouncing a check, banking experts say. And although most checking accounts come with fees, they’ve traditionally been considered a loss-leader for banks, says Ben Woolsey, spokesman for credit-card comparison site CreditCards.com. “They’re regarded as a gateway account — to serve as platform to obtain higher-margin business from the customer, like mortgages and car loans,” he says.

Still, banks are under pressure to generate more revenue from checking accounts, Woolsey says. Bank customers who sign up for overdraft protection services, for instance, tend to have significantly higher annual fees, according to a separate study by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Wednesday, August 7, 2013

Why the rich never retire

Rich People Retirement
 The ultimate American dream used to be to get rich young and "retire by 40." Now the goal for the rich is to retire past 70—if they retire at all.

A new survey shows that America's highest earners don't plan on retiring until they are at least 70 years old. Lower-income groups—and even those considered "affluent"—plan to retire much younger, according to the study from Spectrem Group, a wealth research firm.

When asked "At what age do you expect to retire?" nearly one-third of those with annual earnings of $750,000 or more answered "over 70." Fifteen percent of them say they never plan to retire.

On the other hand, only 6 percent of those making under $100,000 a year plan to retire after 70, and the same percentage say they never plan to retire. Most plan to retire by 65.

The Spectrem survey is backed up by other, previous studies. A 2010 study from Barclay's Wealth found that 54 percent of millionaires say they want to continue working in retirement. Globally, 60 percent of those with a net worth of $15 million or more plan to stay involved with work "no matter what their age."

The numbers contrast with the popular notion that Americans are retiring later mainly because they can't afford to stop working. The Spectrem survey shows that the highest earners—and those who can best afford to retire—are actually working the longest.

 Many of the respondents earnings $750,000 or more are business owners and entrepreneurs. They are far more likely to take risk in their finances and their life, and they are more likely than those with lower incomes to credit hard work for their success.

George Walper, president of Spectrem, said there are two broad reasons for the retirement-denial of the rich. First, he said, many of them own businesses that they cannot easily leave. If they retire, the business fails—so they have little choice but to keep working until they have a succession plan or buyer.

But he said the main reason is that entrepreneurs love their work and can't imagine life without it.

"Most of these people enjoy working and are very involved in their businesses," Walper said. "To them it isn't really work." For those in lower-income brackets, he said, "a job is a job—it's a more traditional experience."

Corporate America is now filled with founders over 70 who are still active in their companies or in business—from David H. Murdock, the 90-year-old CEO of Dole Food who is trying to take the company private) to the 90-year old Sumner Redstone at Viacom and the 71-year-old casino tycoon Steve Wynn.

Walper added that even among top earners who say they're "retired," many continue to serve on boards, advise their companies or work the phones several hours a day. They also may be doing more of their business from a more pleasant spot—say, their pool in Palm Beach—rather than a corner office.

"They may say they're retired because they're only working five days a week now instead of seven. And they're doing it from a different location," Walper said. "To them, that's retirement."

—By CNBC's Robert Frank.

Free Intraday Stock Tips for 8th August 2013

RELINFRA
Reliance Infrastructure   Limited
Action
Trigger Price
Stop Loss
 Target 1
Target 2
Buy Above
336 331 341 348
Sell Below
329 332 325 315
INDUSINDBK
Indusind Bank Limited
Action
Trigger Price
Stop Loss
 Target 1
Target 2
Buy Above
374 368 381 391
Sell Below
366 371 360 346
STAR
Strides Arcolab Limited
Action
Trigger Price
Stop Loss
 Target 1
Target 2
Buy Above
818 775 868 925
S.Sell Below
772 780 720 630

Tuesday, August 6, 2013

You think you know about the U.S. dollar?

  The greenback has a colorful history that’s all its own. Here are a few facts you might not have known about the world’s most popular reserve currency. (Except where noted, all information is courtesy of federalreserveeducation.org.)

Better to be Ben than Abe

While use is the obvious reason for the different lifespans, you can bet they would be considerably shorter if the bills were made out of actual paper. The Federal Reserve gives its makeup as one-fourth linen and three-fourths cotton.

And if you have a bill that has reached the end of the line and it would like exchange it, but no bank will take it, the Bureau of Engraving and Printing is the place you want to be.

The four-thousandth fold

I’m sure at some point all people have asked themselves, “How many times would I have to fold this bill backward and forward before it would rip in half?” Right?

Here’s your answer: 4,000. And before you ask, no, 3,999, won’t do it.

It costs how much to make $1?

About 45% of the notes printed each year are $1, and 95% are used as replacement notes. (There’s a lot of folding going on.) Despite what one would think would be only minor differences in the cost to make different denominations, the Federal Reserve states that $1 and $2 notes cost 5.5 cents each, $5, $10 and $100 notes cost 9.9 cents, and $20 and $50 notes cost 10.9 cents.

Over $900 million a day

The Bureau of Engraving and Printing produces 26 million notes a day, with a face value of approximately $907 million. To give you an idea of how that fits into the overall scheme of things, according to the Federal Reserve, there was approximately $1.2 trillion in circulation as of July 24, 2013, although $1.15 trillion of that total was in Federal Reserve notes.

It’s all about the Woodrows

The Federal Reserve Board currently issues $1, $2, $5, $10, $20, $50, and $100 notes. The largest denomination Federal Reserve note ever issued for public circulation was the $10,000 note. On July 14, 1969, the Federal Reserve and the Department of the Treasury announced that banknotes in denominations of $500, $1,000, $5,000, and $10,000 would be discontinued due to lack of use. Although they were issued until 1969, they were last printed in 1945.

The largest bill ever printed by the Bureau of Engraving and Printing was the $100,000 gold certificate. However, they were never put into circulation and were used for transactions only between Reserve banks. Woodrow Wilson is the president featured on the bill.




Show us the money ... seriously, we need to check it out

The Secret Service was created in 1865 to fight rampant counterfeiting in the wake of the Civil War, when, according the Secret Service web site, it was estimated that a full one-third to one-half of the currency in circulation was counterfeit.

The agency didn’t take on the additional, and more well-known, duty of protecting the president until after the assassination of William McKinley in 1901.



Free Intraday Stock Tips for 7th August 2013

VGAURD
V-Gaurd Industries   Limited
Action
Trigger Price
Stop Loss
 Target 1
Target 2
Buy Above
562 555 566 573
Sell Below
554 559 551 542
GESHIP
The Great eastern Shipping Comp Limited
Action
Trigger Price
Stop Loss
 Target 1
Target 2
Buy Above
233 231 236 241
Sell Below
230 232 227 223
UBL
United Breweries   Limited
Action
Trigger Price
Stop Loss
 Target 1
Target 2
Buy Above
735 715 753 775
S.Sell Below
713 720 695 660

Sunday, August 4, 2013

Free Intraday Stock Tips for 5th August 2013

TITAN
Titan industries   Limited
Action
Trigger Price
Stop Loss
 Target 1
Target 2
Buy Above
284 276 289 297
Sell Below
274 277 270 258
AMBUJACEM
Ambuja Cements   Limited
Action
Trigger Price
Stop Loss
 Target 1
Target 2
Buy Above
172 170 174 177
Sell Below
169.5 171.5 168.5 164.5
SUNTV
Sun TV Network   Limited
Action
Trigger Price
Stop Loss
 Target 1
Target 2
Buy Above
428 417 440 457
S.Sell Below
415 420 405 385

Wednesday, July 31, 2013

Free Intraday Stock Tips for 1st August 2013

VMART
V-Mart Retail   Limited
Action
Trigger Price
Stop Loss
 Target 1
Target 2
Buy Above
177 168 185 194
Sell Below
167 170 160 145
IDEA
Idea Cellular   Limited
Action
Trigger Price
Stop Loss
 Target 1
Target 2
Buy Above
170 164.4 174 180
Sell Below
164 165.5 160 150
LUPIN
Lupin  Limited
Action
Trigger Price
Stop Loss
 Target 1
Target 2
Buy Above
874 860 883 897
S.Sell Below
858 865 851 830

Tuesday, July 30, 2013

Free Intraday Stock Tips for 31st July 2013

TATAGLOBAL
Tata Global beverages   Limited
Action
Trigger Price
Stop Loss
 Target 1
Target 2
Buy Above
160.5 158.5 162.5 167
Sell Below
158 160 155.5 152
INFRATEL
Bharati Airtel Limited
Action
Trigger Price
Stop Loss
 Target 1
Target 2
Buy Above
150.5 148 152 153.5
Sell Below
147.5 149 145 143.5
VGAURD
V-Gaurd Industries   Limited
Action
Trigger Price
Stop Loss
 Target 1
Target 2
Buy Above
539 533 542 548
S.Sell Below
532 536 530 522

Sunday, July 28, 2013

Free Intraday Stock Tips for 29th July 2013

BATAINDIA
Bata india   Limited
Action
Trigger Price
Stop Loss
 Target 1
Target 2
Buy Above
911 901 917 928
Sell Below
899 906 894 880
JETAIRWAYS
Jet Airways (India) Limited
Action
Trigger Price
Stop Loss
 Target 1
Target 2
Buy Above
400 377 422 448
Sell Below
375 380 353 310
IDEA
Idea Cellular   Limited
Action
Trigger Price
Stop Loss
 Target 1
Target 2
Buy Above
165.5 163 166.5 169
S.Sell Below
162.5 164 162 159

Thursday, July 25, 2013

Free Intraday Stock Tips for 26th July 2013

TATACOM
Tata communications   Limited
Action
Trigger Price
Stop Loss
 Target 1
Target 2
Buy Above
167 164 172 179
Sell Below
163 165.6 158 150
ZEEL
Zee Entertainment Enterprises Limited
Action
Trigger Price
Stop Loss
 Target 1
Target 2
Buy Above
261 251 270 280
Sell Below
250 254 243 225
HEROMOTOCO
Hero Motocorp   Limited
Action
Trigger Price
Stop Loss
 Target 1
Target 2
Buy Above
1835 1807 1853 1883
S.Sell Below
1800 1816 1786 1745
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