** Stupid Quotes
** Biz-Tips by Dr. Kevin Nunley – Common Knowledge
** Featured Article – A Primer on Hedge Funds
from Bill Staton
** Quote of the Day
** A Little Levity – Visitation
** Stress Tip by Dr. Rae Baum
** Health Tip of the Week – Counterfeit Pharmaceuticals:
A Real Problem Or Big Pharma Hype?
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Stupid Quotes
"That's just the tip of the ice cube."
- Neil Hamilton, BBC2
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3/28
Biz Tips
by Dr. Kevin Nunley
Common Knowledge
It's common knowledge that putting a photo of
a product in an ad or on a web site increases sales. Services can
also benefit from having a picture.
-----
Looking for ways to market your product, service,
or idea? Ask Kevin! He'll give you fresh promotion ideas free. Reach Kevin
Nunley and his staff of marketing experts at kevin@drnunley.com or 801-328-9006.
See the promotion packages that are working best for his customers at http://DrNunley.com
Trivia
The three dots in Domino's Pizza, stand for
the first three stores. They wanted to add a dot for each new store, but
obviously that would be impossible as there are now over 7,000 stores.
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- 12/28
**Featured Article**
A Primer on Hedge Funds from Bill Staton
Not a day goes by when the phrase "hedge fund"
doesn't appear in the headline of some newspaper or Web site. In
fact, hedge funds are so popular now that former Federal Reserve Chairman
Alan Greenspan recently described them as "extraordinarily important...
the pollinating bees of Wall Street."
At present there are an estimated 8,800 of those
"pollinating bees" in the U.S., controlling some $1.2 trillion. And
according to Greenspan, hedge funds, private equity and similar investments
will dominate the investment landscape in the 21st century in the United
States.
For many people, however, there is little known
about, and much fear associated with, hedge funds, which according to the
NASD are basically private investment pools for wealthy, financially sophisticated
investors. Who should use them, when should they use them and why
are just some of the questions in search of answers.
What are hedge funds? David A. Vaughan,
a partner with Dechert LLP, in written comments to the SEC in 2003 said
a "hedge fund" is an expression believed to have been first applied in
1949 to a fund managed by Alfred Winslow Jones. Mr. Jones' private
investment fund combined both long and short equity positions to "hedge"
the portfolio's exposure to movements in the market.
Hedge funds today are not necessarily defined
by a particular strategy and often do not "hedge" in the economic sense.
According to the NASD Web site, for instance, there is no exact definition
of the term "hedge fund" in federal or state securities laws. Traditionally,
they have been organized as partnerships, with the general partner (or
managing member) managing the fund's portfolio, making investment decisions,
and normally having a significant personal investment in the fund, the
NASD wrote.
According to the NASD, hedge fund managers typically
seek absolute positive investment performance. This means that hedge
funds target a specific range of performance, and attempt to produce targeted
returns irrespective of the underlying trends of the stock market.
This stands in contrast to investments like mutual funds where success
or failure is often measured in terms of relative performance comparisons
to a stock index like the Dow Jones Industrial Average.
To get positive investment performance, NASD suggests
that hedge fund managers use sophisticated investment strategies and techniques
that may include short selling; arbitrage; hedging; leverage; investing
in distressed or bankrupt companies; investing in derivatives, such as
options and futures contracts; investing in volatile international markets;
and investing in privately issued securities. Most funds are dedicated
to a single strategic approach, while other funds, known as multi-strategy,
combine two or more strategies in an attempt to reduce risk through diversification
of investment methods.
Hedge funds generally charge two types of fees:
one based on the assets, the other based on the fund's performance.
Performance fees of 20 percent of profits are common, along with a fixed
annual asset-based fee typically 2 percent, but sometimes as low as 1 percent
or as high as 4 percent. A fund charging 2 percent of assets and
20 percent of profits would be said to charge "two and twenty."
Hedge funds are usually only open to limited numbers
of wealthy, financially sophisticated investors or what are called accredited
investors or qualified purchasers. An accredited investor is, according
to the SEC, a natural person who has individual net worth (or joint net
worth with the person's spouse) that exceeds $1 million at the time of
the purchase. Or a natural person with income exceeding $200,000 in each
of the two most recent years, or joint income with a spouse exceeding $300,000
for those years and a reasonable expectation of the same income level in
the current year. In most cases, the minimum initial investment for
a hedge fund is $1 million or more. The reason for such high minimums
is that such pools are limited in the number of investors they are allowed
to have.
Hedge funds, however, are not for everyone, even
the super wealthy or super sophisticated. According to the NASD,
hedge funds are private investments, prohibited from advertising or otherwise
publicly offering their securities and are therefore not required to register
with the SEC as investment advisers. As a result, NASD notes that
unregistered private hedge funds do not provide many of the investor protections
that apply to registered investment products, such as mutual funds.
Hedge funds generally are not subject to numerous mutual fund rules, such
as regulations: requiring that fund shares be redeemable; protecting against
conflicts of interests; requiring disclosure of information about a fund's
management, holdings, fees and expenses, and performance; and limiting
the use of leverage. Advocates of the hedge fund structure note that
freedom from these regulatory restrictions is precisely necessary in order
for the fund to pursue its strategies and that this is an important advantage
of the hedge fund manager when competing in the arena.
As for measuring performance, there continues
to be great debate with some financial planners suggesting that it's difficult
to conduct a benchmark or peer-to-peer comparison and others noting that
there are many databases that now track hedge fund performance.
-----
Bill Staton, MBA, CFA, America's Money Coach®
Chairman, The Staton Institute Inc. & Staton Financial Advisors
LLC bill@billstaton.com
mary@statoninstitute.com
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Quote of the Day
"Have you ever had the experience of parking in
a one-hour zone, inserting the coins, than finding yourself, forty-five
minutes later, still in line at the bank? At such times, you might suddenly
find religion, and fervently pray that you will make your meter."
- Victor Blume
How To Make A Fortune In The
Next Trillion Dollar Industry
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in History!
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- Adrienne
- 3/7
A Little Humor
Visitation
=-=-=-=-=-=
Several women were visiting elderly Mrs. Diamond
who was very ill.
After a while, they rose to leave and told her,
"Esther, we will keep you in our prayers."
"Just wash the dishes in the kitchen," the ailing
woman said, "I can do my own praying."
-----
Joe, John and Bob were moving furniture. While
Joe and John were struggling with a particularly heavy oak wardrobe Joe
noticed that Bob was nowhere in sight.
"John, where's Bob?" asked Joe.
"He should be helping us with this thing."
"He is helping," said John,
"He's inside holding the clothes hangers in place!"
-----
It was the beginning of December. The trip had
gone reasonably well, and he was ready to go back. The airport on the other
hand had turned a tacky red and green with loudspeakers blared annoying
elevator renditions of cherished Christmas carols.
Being someone who took Christmas very seriously,
and being slightly tired, he was not in a particularly good mood.
Going to check in his luggage, he saw hanging
mistletoe. Not real mistletoe, but very cheap plastic with red paint on
some of the rounder parts and green paint on some of the flatter and "pointier"
parts, that could be taken for mistletoe only in a very Picasso sort of
way.
With a considerable degree of irritation and nowhere
else to vent it, he said to the lady attendant, "Even if I were not married,
I would not want to kiss you under such a ghastly mockery of mistletoe."
"Sir, look more closely at where the mistletoe
is."
(pause)
"Ok, I see that it's above the luggage scale,
which is the place you'd have to step forward for a kiss."
"That's not why it's there."
(pause)
"Ok, I give up. Why is it there?"
"It's there so you can kiss your luggage goodbye."
-----
A doting father used to sing his little children
to sleep until he overheard the four-year-old tell the three-year-old,
"If you pretend you're asleep, he stops."
-----
Sometimes you get,
and sometimes you get got.
Publications of Interest
In each issue, we swap a notice with another E-zine.
Most of the time they are invitations to subscribe to their publication,
but sometime it could be for a product or service they provide.
-----
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Stress Tip
by Dr. Rae Baum
You will find this "Stress Tip Message" helpful
to stay focused and on purpose. You can put this message to work
by reading it often throughout the day.
Ask questions.
Assess your needs.
Always listen.
- Dr. Rae
~ Need help with this "Weekly StressTip"?
Invest in yourself, contact The Baum Group
at http://www.YourStressMatters.com/contactus.htm
How To Make A Fortune In The
Next Trillion Dollar Industry
Enjoy a rare combination of stability and ground
floor
opportunity with one of the fastest growing companies
in History!
http://adrienne.X-PowerPro.com
- Adrienne
- 3/7
You Know You're from New Jersey
When ...
You've never pumped your own gas.
Health Tip of the Week
by Dr. Earl Mindell
Counterfeit Pharmaceuticals: A Real Problem
Or Big Pharma Hype?
"Pharmafakes" are an increasing problem in developing
countries, where desperation is high and oversight lax. Criminals who are
willing to take advantage of those who most need the help of conventional
medicine—selling them worthless, inactive substances packaged as medicines—are
laughing all the way to the bank, leaving death and distrust in their wake.
Drug dealers and other underworld types are finding that trafficking in
fake prescription drugs has a profit margin even better than the sale of
illicit drugs.
The New York-based Center for Medicines in the
Public Interest estimates that global sales of these fakes will reach $75
billion by the end of the decade. Many of these counterfeits originate
in China and India. The U.S. FDA (Food and Drug Administration) has warned
American consumers looking to Canada for affordable medicine to watch out
for Canadian companies suspected of selling fakes via the Internet.
The counterfeit scourge has struck hardest in
Africa, where AIDS drugs and the anemia drug Procrit have been counterfeited
widely, threatening the very lives of those reliant on these drugs for
survival—especially children. Fake insulin kills diabetics, and fake injectable
adrenaline—used to re-start the hearts of anesthetized people on the operating
table—has left many others dead.
On the other hand, some argue that the issue with
pharmafakes is being over-hyped by drug companies seeking to continue gouging
the world with 1,000 percent markups on the drugs they make and sell. These
dissenting voices claim that Big Pharma and the government are collaborating
to crush any valid competition from the little guys by trying to scare
the public away from anything Big Pharma didn't make and sell at their
high prices. And the truth is that some pharmafakes are just as good as
the real thing, and are sold at much lower prices. But there's almost no
way, at least abroad where regulation is lax, to know which are dangerous
or useless fakes and which aren't. What's a consumer to do?
In the United States, legislation is underway
to strengthen oversight with stricter licensing requirements for pharmacies
and tougher penalties for counterfeiters—possibly, giving each drug batch
an electronic "pedigree" that would be impossible for counterfeiters to
duplicate. Just be cautious about buying drugs from the Web—be sure you're
buying from a reputable source.
This situation really plays up the differences
between Westernized nations where the more dangerous issue is the overuse
and over-prescription of overpriced me-too drugs that turn out to be more
dangerous than the condition they're hyped to treat, and poorer nations
where the need for real drugs is far more dire. There's no question that
unethical creeps are causing hundreds, even thousands, of deaths through
drug counterfeiting in Third World countries; overseas, the problem is
much more serious and will probably get worse before it gets better. If
you want to do something about that, contact your elected officials and
the offices of the Pan American Health Organization (the U.S.-based regional
office of the World Health Organization), and if you have to travel abroad,
be cautious about buying drugs in Third World nations.
An overhaul of public health, with reductions
in overweight and obesity and drastic shifts in diet and activity levels
in Western nations and better control over deadly diseases like AIDS in
Third World countries, would do a lot to discourage counterfeiters because
the market for costly drugs would drop. For yourself and your family, only
use prescription and over-the-counter drugs when you absolutely have to.
-----
To learn more about how Dr. Mindell can help you
get into the best shape of your life, visit: http://freelife.com/Sites/keith/Redir.cfm?page=/info/nutrition/nutritionhome.cfm
Things You'd Never Expect to see in a Normal
Day
A teenager doing their homework on Friday night.
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Bob
Copyright – 2006
Your-Business
Newsletter #524
