The 8 Biggest Mistakes When Designing Portfolios - and How To Avoid Them Are you as good an investor as you think? Do you consider yourself a well-informed investor able to anticipate and avoid nearly all pitfalls associated with investing? Chances are, you are making one of the common errors that could cost you hundreds or even thousands of dollars, or worse yet, your financial independence, control and security. [More] Emotional Trading When you bought that new car you knew as soon as you drove it off the lot it would be worth 20% less than you paid for it. Twenty percent is a lot and more than most folks should be willing to risk when investing. Forget “the long haul” as you don't want to take the 40% losses that many investors did in 2000. Usually a good rule of thumb is 10%. When you drive that stock off the exchange floor your risk should be limited. You decide how much you are willing to lose if it goes down instead of up and as it goes up carry that risk percentage along to lock in your profit. [More] How To Realistically Set Your Fees - Part 3 How does this effect our hourly rate, let's see. Last article we left off at $56 per hour. This represented a yearly salary of $42,000 plus annual business expenses of $15,000. If we take the $15,600 in benefit costs and divide by our billable hours of 1100 per year, we get approximately $14 per hour. This brings our total hourly rate to $70 per hour. [More] Pivot Points in Forex: Mapping Your Time Frame It is useful to have a map and be able to see where the price is relative to previous market action. This way we can see how is the sentiment of traders and investors at any given moment, it also gives us a general idea of where the market is heading during the day. This information can help us decide which way to. I Wish Banks Were Budget Friendly I Wish Banks Were Budget Friendly No, I'm not talking about lowering service charges and fees, although that would be nice too. I've been working on a personal budget the last couple weeks and I've got all. Diversification For Children After reading a comment by Single Ma not long ago, I realized that it would be a great idea to distill some of the more basic ideas about investing down to a simple level so that even a small child could understand them and not become bored at the idea of investing in the stock [...].