Mutual Funds vs. ETFs

I increasingly find myself interested in ETFs more than Mutual Funds. Mutual Funds tend to come and go and I don't want to analyze every mutual fund that someone dreams up. It's even less appealing when you know that if it does poorly, they'll just shut down that fund to hide their results. Index funds are much more appealing and in that vein I've started putting more and more ETFs in my portfolio. Now obviously I wouldn't touch a leveraged ETF with someone else's money, but I can get into buying treasuries in my brokerage account instead of going through a bunch of hassle.

Obviously much like a mutual fund, I'm going to wind up paying for things that aren't strictly the investment, but their goal is to track whatever it is they track. As such fees seem to be reasonable since they'd have no hope of doing so.

Two of My Passions

Great article on WorthyPosts that hits on two of my favorite subjects: Green society and Money.

The article Green Savings Strategies, discusses some "do it yourself" ways to both help the environment and save money. I'm all in favor of that, but I am very anxious for our government to provide more incentive to do it. I feel like every time I use a CF lightbulb I'm just helping congress ignore the issue for another year.

Links for Friday

I've found that link lists tend to be my favorite way of producing content and other people seem to like them too. Easy and fun, so lets do one:

• Personal Finance and Investing (PF&I) has an old post where he puts forth a proposal on how to fix health care. In light of the garbage we're winding up with I think it deserves a second look.
• Trend Technician has a piece of how to use candlestick charts. More importantly, why to use candlestick charts. I like the way he describes the benefits rather than angling on which is "better."
• I found the previous link from this WorthyPosts article about stock investing tools. This is another no-nosense article that doens't sell you a bill of goods. Nothing's easy in life.
• Finally Secure Saving has a good no-nonsense post about how to build your savings account. I like when poeple get a reality check instead of some magic concept that there's a hidden secret.

Selena Gomez Getting Paid

I'm reading about what Selena Gomez is earning and I was thinking to myself it says something about what we pay for in society. It's very odd that personalities are worth so much. There are tons of people who would be happy to do what she does for free, yet she can command millions to do it. And she's not even a particularly highly paid actress. I wouldn't think her VORP (to steal a baseball term) would be this high, or any actor's for that matter.

Boma Pictures

I haven't written in quite a while and I need to address that. Sadly this will just be a quick check in pointing out a great collection of pictures of Boma in the AKL. You should go check them out.