Mount Airy Casino Resort receives AAA’s Four Diamond ratingJust 6.3 percent of more than 27,000 AAA inspected and approved hotels receive the prestigious rating.AAA North Penn recently presented Mount Airy Casino Resort with its ninth Four Diamond Award. In addition to the Four Diamond, Mount Airy was also recognized for the first time with the AAA “Best of Housekeeping” award. This award is presented to the top 25 percent of all hotels, [...]
Source Business - poconorecord.com http://bit.ly/2EUkFkv
الأربعاء، 5 يونيو 2019
This App Helps You Invest Like a Hedge Fund (You Can Start with $500)
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You’ve heard of robo-investing, right? That’s when online financial firms manage your investments with software.
And you’ve heard of robo-advisors. That’s when apps automate your savings and investments for you.
Ah, but have you heard of the app that’s built like a “robo hedge fund?” Have you? It’s an innovative new twist.
You’ve heard of hedge funds — the rich guy’s investment vehicle. Because you have to invest at least $250,000 to join most hedge funds, they act as exclusive clubs for the wealthy, with a velvet rope keeping out everyday investors like you or me. Hedge funds are considered to be elite, aggressive, strategic and sophisticated — and out of reach for most of us.
Titan says you can still get in on the action, even if you don’t have a spare quarter-million dollars sitting around. In fact, all you need to get started is $500.
Titan is a simple, user-friendly investment app that mirrors the financial moves of top hedge funds. Here’s what it does:
- It analyzes the quarterly regulatory filings of the leading, most prestigious hedge funds as soon as each filing becomes public.
- Its software mines the data to determine which stocks were most popular among all those funds. These hedge funds use sophisticated strategies to choose stocks and sometimes borrow money to buy more stock.
- Titan puts its investors’ money into a portfolio of the top 20 stocks, based on what all those hedge funds have been buying. Titan believes these stocks have the best prospects for long-term growth.
- Portfolios are automatically updated on a quarterly basis.
Titan earns a 1% annual fee on what you invest.
Oh, and there’s this: All three of Titan’s co-founders are former hedge fund guys who are now heavily invested in their Titan portfolios — the same stocks they’d be investing your savings in.
Your Own Money Manager in Your Pocket
On the iPhone’s App Store, users rate Titan’s app at 4.5 out of 5 stars, with users praising the app as intuitive and user-friendly. “It truly feels like your own personal hedge fund in your pocket,” commented one user.
Despite its high reviews, Titan has inevitably drawn some online criticism — like just about every app does. Some naysayers accuse it of relying on outdated data from regulatory filings. Titan’s response is that the stock-trading data it uses is fresh enough to be useful in crafting a long-term investment strategy. Titan believes that it and the hedge funds it’s tracking are all following long-term plans for growth.
And the proof is in the pudding:
As of May 31, 2019, Titan’s portfolio for an aggressive client had increased by 17% so far in 2019, outperforming the S&P 500, which rose 10.7%.*
Built Like a Hedge Fund
When Titan made its debut in 2018, it sometimes got called a hedge fund, or at least it got compared to one.
“Here Come the Robo Hedge Funds,” reads a headline on WealthManagement.com. And the website TechCrunch announced that Titan “isn’t technically a hedge fund, but it’s built like one.”
Just to be clear, Titan isn’t actually a hedge fund. Investors in a hedge fund pool their money together into a fund, while with Titan, your money is kept in your own separate account.
Seeking to set itself apart, Titan also posts lots of educational videos aimed at beginning investors. Sometimes these videos will take a deep dive on particular stocks, like Amazon, that are in Titan’s portfolio. Basically, they’ll tell you why they’re investing your money in it.
Mike Brassfield (mike@thepennyhoarder.com) is a senior writer at The Penny Hoarder. He really needs to invest more.
*This article is a paid partnership with Titan Invest (“Titan”). All opinions are our own. This is for informational purposes only and does not constitute a comprehensive description of Titan’s investment advisory services. Titan uses a proprietary algorithmic strategy in selecting recommendations to advisory clients. Please see Titan’s website (http://bit.ly/2E4pciE) and the Program Brochure (available on the website) for more information. Certain investments are not suitable for all investors. Before investing, consider your investment objectives and Titan’s fees. The rate of return on investments can vary widely over time, especially for long term investments. Investment losses are possible, including the potential loss of all amounts invested. Titan’s registration as an SEC registered investment adviser does not imply a certain level of skill or training and no inference to the contrary should be made. Nothing here should be considered as an offer, solicitation of an offer, or advice to buy or sell securities. The above content is for illustrative purposes only to demonstrate products, services and information available from Titan. Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Any historical returns, expected returns, or probability projections, are hypothetical in nature and may not reflect actual future performance. All Titan performance results include the use of a personalized hedge for a hypothetical client with an “Aggressive” risk profile; clients with “Moderate” or “Conservative” risk profiles would have experienced lower returns. Please visit http://bit.ly/2HWuXlP for full disclosures on our hedging process. 2019 YTD results are from 1/1/19 through 5/31/19 and represent performance of a hypothetical account created on Titan’s inception date of 2/20/18 using Titan’s investment process for an aggressive portfolio, not an actual account. Performance results are net of fees and include dividends and other adjustments. See Titan’s website for full performance disclosures.
This was originally published on The Penny Hoarder, which helps millions of readers worldwide earn and save money by sharing unique job opportunities, personal stories, freebies and more. The Inc. 5000 ranked The Penny Hoarder as the fastest-growing private media company in the U.S. in 2017.
source The Penny Hoarder http://bit.ly/2IlsfFH
The Easiest Way to Meal Prep That I’ve Found
Over the last few years, I’ve done a lot of experimentation with meal prepping, with the goal of having lots of home-cooked meals in the freezer that I can pull out at a moment’s notice. I’ve tried all kinds of different things, sometimes successful and sometimes a complete failure and often in between. When something works, I take note of it and try to reuse that strategy going forward.
What follows is the single most efficient and successful meal prepping strategy I’ve yet tried. It makes a bunch of lunches and family meals quite easily and they’re all quite tasty, even right from the freezer.
Wait, what is it you’re doing, and why? Meal prepping is simply the practice of making meals in advance and freezing them late in the preparation process so that they can be pulled from the freezer and very quickly finished when time is tight. This helps keep meal costs low, since making meals at home is less expensive than eating out and meal prepping usually lets you take big advantage of bulk purchasing, and it also saves time over the long run, though there is some up-front time investment.
This article focuses on the absolute easiest meal prep I’ve ever done that managed to have really successful results. This isn’t going to be a complex gourmet meal; rather, I’m just aiming for a very quick meal prep that results in pretty tasty individual meals for future lunches.
So, here’s what I do. Note that you will need quite a bit of freezer space to pull this off well, but I account somewhat for different freezer sizes in the article.
Start off by getting your stuff ready. You’ll want a pound of dry pasta, a jar of your favorite pasta sauce, and about two cups of shredded mozzarella for every four lunches or one family meal you want to prep. This whole procedure can be multiplied by the amount you want to make with ease. For this example, let’s say you’re just making four individual meals, so you’ll want a pound of pasta, a jar of your preferred pasta sauce, and two cups of shredded mozzarella. You can get your favorite type and brand of each – I just snagged store brand versions of each kind and I think that rotini turns out very well when you make this. You can add additional ingredients if you wish, like frozen vegetables or cooked ground beef, but I’ll leave that up to you.
You’ll also want some meal prep containers. By “meal prep container,” I mean any container with a lid that’s dishwasher safe, freezer safe, microwave safe for individual meals, and oven safe for family meals. I want it to be safe in all of those environments so that I can use it in a multitude of ways. These are wonderful meal prep containers for individual meals that are well worth the investment if you plan on doing a lot of meal prepping. If you’re just starting out, you can (and probably should) get inexpensive plastic individual meal prep containers like these; they’ll last for about ten to twenty uses before cracking and becoming problematic, in my experience. That’s plenty long enough to figure out if meal prepping is right for you.
If you’re interested in doing family-sized meals, I haven’t yet found a reasonably priced freezer-to-fridge-to-oven casserole-sized dish that’s reasonably priced. Basically, choose two of these features – cheap, highly reusable, won’t break – and that’s what you get. Because of that, I stick with these, which work really well for about twenty or so uses until the lid starts cracking. I have had cracks form in somewhat more expensive glass reusable dishes when I moved them from cold areas to hot areas, so I don’t view them as reliable; I’ve seen very expensive earthenware and enameled cast iron dishes work well but they’re very pricy and unlikely to recoup the investment in any reasonable amount of time.
The actual procedure is really easy. Just boil the pasta according to your package directions. When it’s done, strain it thoroughly, then toss it with the pasta sauce until all of the pasta is coated evenly. If you have other ingredients you want to add, toss them in now – things like cooked ground beef or frozen chopped vegetables. Then separate the pasta equally into each of the containers – in this example, with one pound of pasta and one jar of sauce, just divide it equally among four individual meal prep containers or put it all into one family sized container.
Then – and here’s the trick – put the containers in the freezer open for about three hours or so. You can certainly leave the containers in there for longer if you wish, but don’t leave them in there for much longer than a single overnight period if you did this in the evening.
After the basic meal is frozen, put half a cup of shredded mozzarella on top of each individual container or two cups on top of a family-sized container, put a lid on each container, label it with some masking tape, and pop it back in the freezer. It’s good to go whenever you want it!
The individual containers of this recipe reheat really well in the microwave straight from the freezer and, in my opinion, even better from the fridge if you move a container to the fridge to let it thaw. I find I don’t even need to defrost it for it to turn out pretty well, though I think a short period on defrost mode if it came straight from the freezer helps. The cheese melts into the pasta and when you pull it from the microwave, just toss it around with a fork to distribute the cheese and sauce evenly. It makes for a really great lunch.
The thing is, if I buy the ingredients for this at my regular local store prices (and don’t buy an overly expensive sauce), this makes super-filling, super-tasty, and super-convenient lunches that cost less than a dollar each. If I happen to hit on a sale, the price goes down even further – this can often be made for about $0.70 per individual meal, or even less, with a regular sale.
What’s next? I’ve found that this basic procedure works really well with most one-pot meal (meals that you would serve out of a single dish); I simply used this very simple pasta dish as an example of how easy it is.
If you want to try this with other one-pot meals, follow the basic structure above. Make your one-pot meal, serve enough for an individual person’s full meal into an individual container or a full family meal into a family-sized container, then freeze it with the lid off for just long enough for the meal to freeze – three hours usually does it. If you tend to put on a topping at the very end of the actual meal preparation, like some cheese or seasoning on top, put that on after the initial freeze. Once the meals are frozen, put a lid on each one and return them to the freezer.
This basic strategy scales well. It’s not too labor intensive. It enables quite a lot of variety – there are a lot of one-pot meals out there – here’s a bunch from Food Network – and most of them work well with this basic framework.
This pasta recipe, though, is incredibly easy and it just works like a charm for loading your freezer up with very easy, tasty, fast, and incredibly inexpensive meals. If you ever wanted to dabble your toes in meal prepping, it doesn’t get much easier than this.
The post The Easiest Way to Meal Prep That I’ve Found appeared first on The Simple Dollar.
Source The Simple Dollar http://bit.ly/2K2LhDY
Fund Briefing: Bonds
Billions of pounds are invested in bonds. They are a core holding in many people’s portfolios and are relied upon to deliver stable income. However, they are also one of the most misunderstood assets and remain something of a mystery to many investors
Perhaps the simplest way to describe a bond is as an IOU that’s issued by either governments or public companies that need to raise money.
Buying one means you’re lending money to an issuer in exchange for a fixed rate of interest over an agreed period – and the return of your original investment.
Bonds are assessed on the likelihood of the company or government meeting its repayments by specialist agencies such as Standard & Poor’s, which awards the most trusted ones with AAA ratings.
According to Adrian Lowcock, head of personal investing at Willis Owen, bonds don’t behave like shares, and this means they can help diversify your portfolio.
“The price of bonds is generally less volatile, so investors get a more stable income, with less risk to their capital,” says Mr Lowcock.
However, investing in fixed income can seem more complicated than equities as companies generally issue one type of share but many different bonds.
“These will have different interest rates attached to them, different maturity dates (when the loan needs to be repaid) and different terms,” he explains.
A proper assessment of a bond requires an understanding of how it sits in relation to a company’s liabilities – and how sensitive it is to interest rates and inflation.
“Bonds are very technical and complex, so buying a bond issued by Tesco is not the same as buying shares in the retailer,” he adds.
According to Patrick Connolly, a chartered financial planner at Chase de Vere, buying individual bonds can be risky. “We’ve seen supposedly strong and secure companies, such as high street banks, get into financial difficulties – and these risks are greater with smaller companies,” he says.
Being heavily invested in one company that ends up getting into trouble, therefore, could hit your finances hard.
“This is especially so with individual bonds as they aren’t protected by the Financial Services Compensation Scheme,” he adds.
A less risky option is bond funds, whose managers will make the call on which bonds to buy and sell.
Such products, suggests Connolly, should feature in most investment portfolios.
“Investors should spread the risks by investing in bond funds, so if one of their underlying holdings has problems, then this won’t have a huge effect on their overall returns,” he says.
Quick guide: Are bond funds right for me?
Consider investing if…
- You are looking to diversify your overall portfolio
- You want a manager deciding what bonds to buy
- You are looking for less volatile investments
Bond funds are particularly well suited to cautious investors, such as those near or in retirement, or those who want protection against stock market falls.
“Fixed interest has historically paid a steady level of income and isn’t usually subject to significant falls in value, meaning that investors’ capital should be well protected,” he says.
The good news is there’s a wide range of such funds available – but they are likely to differ enormously, so investors need to do their homework before committing their cash.
“Bond funds can vary in terms of the amount of freedom given to the fund manager, the types of bonds they invest in, where they invest geographically, the number of holdings they have, and the term remaining on individual holdings (duration),” explains Mr Connolly.
He suggests it’s worth holding a range of bond types in order to spread your risk.
“Diversification can be achieved by investing in a number of specialist bond funds or alternatively selecting funds with a broad investment remit,” he adds.
As bond funds obviously can’t promise you a fixed rate of interest, they will usually state the target return they are aiming at, although the actual figure may vary.
The level of bond exposure you should go for depends on your attitude and capacity for risk, as well as your financial goals, according to financial adviser Martin Bamford, managing director of Informed Choice.
“More cautious investors have typically opted for higher bond allocations, as high as, say, 60% of the portfolio,” he says.
Bond funds are well suited to cautious investors
Mr Bamford also insists any bond allocation should be spread across different bond sectors, such as government debt and overseas corporate bonds, to manage risks.
“Higher-risk investors are likely to allocate more of their portfolios to domestic and global equities, so bond allocations could fall to, say, 10%-20%,” he says.
Mr Bamford’s current preference, taking into account rising interest rates, is for higher yielding and overseas bond instruments.
“There’s still a place for UK government debt, including index linked gilts, but these have become a smaller part of portfolios in the past few years,” he adds.
However, whether or not putting your money into smaller businesses is a sensible option will largely depend on your investment goals and attitude to risk.
MARLBOROUGH GLOBAL BOND
Value of £100 invested in the fund over five years
| Year | 2014 | 2015 | 2016 | 2017 | 2018 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fund movement in year (%) | 10.48 | 1.2 | 16.62 | 3.99 | -0.21 |
| Value of £100* | 110.48 | 111.81 | 130.39 | 135.6 | 135.3 |
* The £100 was invested on 1 January 2014. Source: Moneywise.co.uk
| Lead Manager | Geoff Hitchin |
| Launch date | 05-Aug-87 |
| Total fund size | £383.6 million |
| Minimum initial investment | £1,000 |
| Minimum additional investment | £1,000 |
| Initial charge | 5% |
| Ongoing charge | 1.18% |
| Annual management fee | 1.13% |
| Contact details for retail investors | 0808 145 2500 |
Fund to watch: Marlborough Global Bond
The aim of the fund is to provide income and capital growth by investing in mainly fixed interest securities.
The managers are free to invest in bonds issued by governments and companies around the world as the fund is genuinely unconstrained in its allocations to countries and regions.
It has a cautious approach that combines a macro view with bottom-up company research and is designed to capture upside while limiting the effect of falling markets.
The portfolio has more than 470 holdings, which helps to spread risk.
International bonds account for 57.9% of the fund, with 28% in UK bonds and less than 1% each in UK equity, UK gilts and alternative trading strategies.
In addition to this, around 12% is currently held in cash/equivalents, according to the most recent fund fact sheet.
Company bond holdings include household names such as Sainsbury’s, McDonald’s, Barclays, Beazley and BHP Billiton.
As far as the credit quality is concerned, 42.4% of the fund is in bonds rated BBB, with 12.6% in BB and 12.5% in non-rated bonds.
It’s a fund that’s currently recommended to clients for their portfolios by financial adviser Martin Bamford, managing director of Informed Choice.
“This fund invests in a mix of investment and sub-investment grade bonds, with around a third in the UK and the rest overseas,” he says.
“It yields a respectable 3.74% and has a low ongoing charge of 0.43%.”
Rob Griffin writes for the Independent, Sunday Telegraph and Daily Express.
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Source Moneywise http://bit.ly/2Z2nPtU
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