Money Management Update
It is times like these when being a proactive investor has both immediate and long term rewards. As we closed out the second quarter, June proved to be another month with major selling pressure. As more and more investors jump on the "bear" bandwagon, it is more important than ever to know what your advisor was doing one year ago when the first sign of subprime and the credit crisis began hitting investor radar. Last summer when the consensus opinion was that subprime was a "non-factor" to the overall U.S. market because it was such a small part of America's GDP - here is what ABL, Inc. was telling investors....
Click here to read the full update
National Media Coverage
"Last Call" with Maria Bartiromo
 Maria Bartiromo's exclusive one-on-one interview with Alan B. Lancz to cover what to expect the second half of 2008 in today's volatile global financial markets. Watch video |
Protecting Your Nest Egg in a Recession
 Alan Lancz is president of Alan B. Lancz & Associates Inc., a professional money management
firm in Toledo, Ohio. Lancz says one of the key factors in a successful portfolio in any type of economy is managing risk. He also has taken the unusual
step of fully disclosing to his clients, on a real-time basis, the holdings in his personal and retirement portfolios, and his company's corporate holdings.
It's important to be strategically in the right areas or sectors of the market. In May 2007, we recommended selling the real estate investment trusts (REITs), utilities and financials.
The financials comprise more than 20 percent of the S&P 500. If you look back at 2000, technology was over 20 percent, and whenever you get a sector that comprises so much of the
market it's usually a concern, a red flag should go up to investors.
They've gone down quite a bit, so it's not as worrisome, but in our estimation there's too much uncertainty. We don't know if another shoe will drop as far as subprime. Usually when there's
fallout that will take longer -- just like with technology, it took more than a year for the sell-off to correct all the excesses in technology -- and we kind of see that with the financials,
so it's an area that we would still avoid.
Being in the right areas and, if we're looking at potentially a recession or at least an economic slowdown, being in more defensive areas is
important. We're right now underweight on consumer discretionary mainly because a lot of the economic growth has been the consumer, and with the problems with housing and credit concerns, we
think it will be much more difficult for the consumer to be the main catalyst for the U.S. economy. We're overweight on more...
Read entire article
Reprinted from Yahoo Finance (11/7/07)
|
