Asset Allocation

Investors may not like it, but they do own more stocks. The average investor equity allocation is now back to where it was around the 2007 market peak. This has some people worried that things are getting frothy once again. Maybe they are, but there are some legitimate reasons for the increase in equity allocations by households. Here are 7 of them:

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Market volatility at the beginning of 2016 spurred many investors to seek a safe place to ride out the storm. As is often the case, the stocks they favored lagged in the recovery, and may be less safe than investors think. Let me explain.

Rare coins can play [an important] role in an investor’s portfolio as an alternative asset...[They] can hold their value quite well over time while remaining small and portable as physical assets. The following infographic...gives an introduction to rare coins, including the stories behind certain coins and why they are worth up to millions of multiples of their face value.

Many of our return assumptions are now at or near post-crisis lows, with many expected returns below historical averages. These assumptions reflect high current valuations and lower global growth over the next five years, in line with a long, flat U.S. recovery.

Gold and gold-related investments will be exploding higher in the coming weeks. Here's why.

There is an underlying belief by many that there is a balancing ratio between silver and gold that can, over the long-term, help in evaluating current market prices. Swings and trends in this ratio are one of the many indicators gold buyers and investors use to evaluate their market positions and the right time to buy or to sell.

There is so much that we could learn from all these three men but, sadly, just like we saw in 2008, most Americans are ignoring the warnings. The mainstream media has conditioned the public to trust them, and right now the mainstream media is insisting that everything is going to be just fine, so will everything be just fine as the months roll along? We will just have to wait and see.

I have come up with 10 rather intriguing-looking small companies that are also attractive from a valuation perspective. The portfolio review lists them by ticker, name, sector, debt to capital, P/E ratio, price to cash flow, dividend yield, market cap, near-term estimated earnings per share growth and longer-term trend line estimated EPS growth.

In December I listed my top 5 overall silver stocks to buy in 2016 and, since almost 4 months have passed since that article was published, here's an update on how each of the picks have performed (up 94.55% on average in the 1st quarter compared to "only" 51.2% performance for the SIL).