FN asks whether local government schemes, and corporate schemes, can come together to foster greater collaboration
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Angelina Jolie's movie, "In the Land of Blood and Honey," does not purport to tell us how conflicts like the one in Bosnia in the early 90's can be avoided, but it builds a mighty strong case for worrying about that question. It cries out for us to think about which present-day tensions or low-level conflicts are Bosnias-in-waiting, says the Institutes Center for International Development and Governance director Charles Cadwell in this commentary for the McClatchy News Services.
Read More... [Source: Urban Institute: International Issues]

The hotel wore Prada?

Designers turned hoteliers? Suites as couture showrooms? We look inside the world's most fashionable hotels.

Read More... [Source: CNN.com - Travel]

Financial Advice for People Who Are Not Super-Rich

The 52-year-old Journal
 of Financial Education

In 1969 I moved to New York City with a Ph.D. in hand to be a finance professor at Baruch College of the City University of New York.

During the next few years I was continually surprised by the gap between the sophistication of financial theories and the primitive misunderstanding of financial markets among the general public.

In 1972 I decided to do something to help improve financial literacy and  started a new journal, the The Journal of Financial Education. I wrote a letter to members of an association of university-level finance teachers and got a response rate of about 10 percent.  Now, 52 years later, the journal is still going strong.

At that time, a popular view was the idea that the stock market was a "random walk". Princeton Professor Burton Malkiel's book with those words in the title appeared in 1973. Getting an edge on the market legally was thought to be difficult or impossible. What carried investors was a general rise in the stock market, not so much anyone's ability to predict a particular stock. Along with the potential of more return went greater risk and at the end of the day you paid for your greater potential with more volatility, and one balanced off the other.

My view today is that it is possible to do better than the average investor, through methods both legal and illegal:

• Better and faster information and execution of trades
• Smarter investment analysis.
• Activities that are illegal but are not enforced. 
• Activities that should be illegal but are not.

Michael Lewis's new book on the Flash Boys shows how front-running makes huge profits even if the advance information is only a matter of fractions of seconds. Traders make a profit by being ahead of the market. Large profits are possible at the expense of slower traders.

The problem for the small investor is figuring out how they should proceed, with questions like:

• Who are the smarter money managers?
• Are they leaving anything for their clients after they take their fees and profit shares?

People who can't beat the market when they pick stocks on their own are unlikely to be able to pick with any assurance the best money market managers, offering reasonable rates. Index funds came into fashion, led by Vanguard and its founder Jack Bogle, as a way of keeping down the cost of mutual funds. That's one option, minimize trading and money management fees.

Finding financial advisers without a stake in your decision are another alternative. But these advisers in the past have only been interested in middle-sized and large investors. Now there are new start-ups that offer financial advice for smaller investors.

Here's a description of one of them called FutureAdvisor that looks interesting.

Three cheers. It's about time that the little guys had more choices in how they are guided in making decisions.

John Tepper Marlin, www.CityEconomist.com

Read More... [Source: CityEconomist Update]

UPDATE 2-ExxonMobil starts drilling for oil in Russia's Arctic

SOCHI, Russia, Aug 9(Reuters) - U.S. oil giant ExxonMobil began drilling in Russia's Arctic on Saturday, despite Western sanctions imposed on its Russian partner Rosneft, and was hailed by Russia's president as an model of "cooperation".

Read More... [Source: Reuters: Company News]

By: Don

The best book on diversification I have read is "The Intelligent Asset Allocator." He also uses the coin flip example to make things very tangible.His book, more than any I have read, hammers on the importance of rebalancing. Without rebalancing, most of the advantages of diversification are not fully realized. No one else gets that point across as well in my opinion.
Read More... [Source: Comments on: Saving and Investing: An Introduction to Diversification]

By: LiteDeals

I have a habit of reading old magazines - it is amazing to see how thrift became the new fashion in such a short time. People were still talking about spending over 100k on remodeling projects 1 year ago...
Read More... [Source: Comments on: It Can Be Achieved& Financially Free That Is]