South Salem, NY -- (SBWIRE) -- 01/24/2017 -- Blue Chip, a full-service collaborative creative PR and marketing agency, based in South Salem, NY has announced the addition of Condor Capital Management to its client list. The firm has been retained for traditional PR to promote the company's new research, The Robo Report™, which is the first and only report of its kind that tracks the performance, portfolio holdings and trades of leading robo advisors.

Commenting on the news, Blue Chip President Bill Bongiorno, said, "We are thrilled that Condor has selected us to get the word out about its proprietary research, The Robo Report™ to investors and financial advisors. It's truly a one of a kind resource that is invaluable to anyone who has invested in or is thinking about investing in robo advisors. It's refreshing to see a company produce something that truly fills a need and a void within an industry and helps people."

Ken Schapiro, President and Founder of Condor Capital, said, "Until we opened accounts at robo advisors and funded them with our own money, no one, including us, had any idea of what was in these advisors or how they have performed. That's all changed now that we have a full year's worth of data and can rank them by performance and track portfolio holdings and investment trades within each robo advisor.

"We believe in transparency for investors and letting them have access to information in order to make better investment decisions, which is why we created The Robo Report™. That's why we have made the report available free of charge at our website and have sought the help of Blue Chip to make the public and financial advisors aware of this resource."

Articles on the report have appeared in the Wall Street Journal: https://t.co/bbnz4Oikqr

Money magazine: http://time.com/money/4616753/robo-advisor-online-financial-planning-advice

About Blue Chip
Founded in 2004, Blue Chip is a full service collaborative creative agency working in the areas of traditional public relations, advertising, new and social media, branding, messaging and other related services for a wide range of companies, with particular knowledge and experience in the financial sector.

The company's website is http://www.bluechippr.com/.

Founded in 1988, Condor Capital Management is an employee-owned, SEC-registered investment advisor based in Martinsville, N.J. employing 16 professional and support staff. Since Condor is a fee-only investment management firm, its fees are based on portfolio size, not sales commissions or number of trades.

For more information on Condor Capital Management, please visit http://www.condorcapital.com or call 732-356-7323.

For more information on this press release visit: http://www.releasewire.com/press-releases/release-3.htm

The topic will be Earning Positive Media Coverage To Grow Your Financial Practice

Westchester, NY -- (ReleaseWire) -- 03/05/2015 -- Blue Chip Public Relations, Inc., an earned media agency helping financial companies grow through media campaigns, has announced that its President Bill Bongiorno will speak at the Financial Planning Association (FPA) luncheon of Fairfield County, CT at 1 pm on March 19, 2015 at the Mill River Country Club, 4567 Main Street, Stratford, CT. The topic will be Earning Positive Media Coverage To Grow Your Financial Practice.

This session will educate advisors on how to gain media coverage in local and mainstream media that reach their target audiences. Key points to be discussed include positioning, media messages and quotable quotes, getting byline articles published, media outreach and leveraging media results on social media and with existing clients for referrals and new business.

"I'm happy to be able to share my knowledge with The Financial Planning Association members to help them to form and implement their own financial PR media relations campaigns to growth their practices," said Mr. Bongiorno, who has 24 years of financial public relations experience and authored a chapter for the book Building Customer Relationships Through Public Relations. He is a past member of the FPA and Public Relations Society of America.

Mr. Bongiorno is the author of Financial Public Relations 101 and was a contributor to the marketing book, Credibility Marketing.

He has authored articles for Investment Advisor, Investment News, Research, Registered Rep. magazines, and The Westchester County Business Journal. He's been quoted on CBSmarketwatch.com, in Investor's Business Daily, and TV Guide, while being featured in The Journal News, PR Week, and Ragan's Media Relations Report. He's also been a guest on News 12 Connecticut TV and Business Talk Radio Network, a nationally syndicated radio network.

He earned a B.A. from SUNY Buffalo in Communication.

About Blue Chip Public Relations, Inc.
Blue Chip Public Relations, Inc. is a public relations agency based in South Salem, NY, that specializes in helping financial companies grow through earned media campaigns and strategic communications. For a client list and results, as well as a recent TV interviews and published articles, visit http://www.bluechippr.com and follow on Twitter @bluechippr and on LinkedIn and Facebook.

More information on the event can be founds at http://fpact.org/net/frmEveReport.aspx?ID=366

For more information on this press release visit: http://www.releasewire.com/press-releases/release-3.htm

Westchester, NY -- (ReleaseWire) -- 02/24/2015 -- Blue Chip Public Relations, Inc., an earned media company specializing in working with financial companies across the country, announced it has been retained by EQIS Capital Management, an asset management and financial technology company in San Rafael, California, to earn media coverage for the new book, Mutual Funds Exposed, by its Chief Financial Strategist Dr. Kenneth Kim and Chief Investment Officer William R. Nelson, as well as for the company and its offerings to investment advisors and their clients.

According to Scott Winters, Co-founder and CEO of EQIS Capital Management, "Financial advisors and their clients, who are mostly individual investors, continue to see the negatives in holding mutual funds. Instead, they are embracing separately managed accounts as a means to having direct investments and ownership of individually tailored portfolios. To build on this momentum, we have retained Blue Chip Public Relations because of its strong ties with the financial media, first-hand knowledge of financial services, and proven media results."

Bill Bongiorno, President of Blue Chip Public Relations, stated, "We are pleased to be working with EQIS to gain media attention for the new book as well as its other newsworthy endeavors. So far, articles with EQIS Capital and Dr. Kim have appeared in USA Today, FORBES, Barron's, Marketwatch, thestreet.com and many others."

EQIS Capital Management is a Turnkey Asset Management Platform (TAMP) that can provide separate account management through direct investments in the stock market coupled with low cost ETF strategies. In addition to managing money in-house, it has outside specialty managers who have passed EQIS's stringent due diligence process. For more information visit http://www.EQIS.com.

About Blue Chip Public Relations, Inc.
Blue Chip Public Relations, Inc. is a public relations agency based in South Salem, NY, founded in 2004, which specializes in earning media coverage for its financial advisor, private money manager, mutual fund and other financial services clients. More information is available at http://www.bluechippr.com and at twitter @bluechippr.com, LinkedIn or Facebook.

For more information on this press release visit: http://www.releasewire.com/press-releases/release-3.htm

Earned Media Public Relations Agency Helps Financial Companies Grow Through Media Campaigns

Westchester, NY -- (ReleaseWire) -- 02/10/2015 -- Blue Chip Public Relations, Inc., an earned media agency helping financial companies grow through media campaigns, is celebrating its ten year anniversary of serving financial companies across the country, announced Bill Bongiorno, Founder and President.

"I'm proud the firm has reached a ten year milestone and pleased to be adding new clients. We continue to evolve as the media landscape keeps changing. Our goal is to continue to grow our financial clientele base and still provide service second to none and results for our clients that speak for themselves," said Mr. Bongiorno, who has 23 years of financial public relations experience and authored a chapter for the book Building Customer Relationships Through Public Relations.

About Blue Chip Public Relations, Inc.
Blue Chip Public Relations, Inc. is a public relations agency based in South Salem, NY, that specializes in helping financial companies grow through earned media campaigns and strategic communications. For a client list and results, as well as a recent TV interviews and published articles, visit http://www.bluechippr.com and follow on Twitter @bluechippr and on LinkedIn and Facebook.

For more information on this press release visit: http://www.releasewire.com/press-releases/release-3.htm

Westchester, NY -- (ReleaseWire) -- 09/02/2014 -- DSM Mutual Funds, a fund family launched by DSM Capital Partners, a global investment management firm with $5.6 billion in AUM (a/o 7/31/14) which has served individual and institutional investors for over 13 years, is pleased to celebrate the five year anniversary of its DSM Large Cap Growth Fund (DSMLX) which launched August 28, 2009 for RIAs, foundations, pensions, and family offices.

Speaking about the Fund's fifth anniversary and growth of the Firm's fund offerings, Steve Memishian, Co-Managing Partner of DSM Capital Partners, said, "The Large Cap Growth Fund was our first foray into the U.S. mutual fund business at a good time to be investing in financial markets. We've since launched three other U.S. mutual funds to complement our first offering. Each makes available the same strategies we've employed for our separately managed account clients."

The Fund is managed by Co-Managing Partner Daniel Strickberger and a team of nine senior analyst/portfolio managers: Justin Burk, CFA; Pinaki Kar; Paul Matlow, CFA; David McVey, CFA; Takehiko Serai, CFA; Steven Tish, CFA; Eric Woodworth, CFA; Kenneth Yang, CFA, and Ling Zhang, CFA.

The Fund's investment team uses a bottom-up, idea-driven, growth style with a long-term investment horizon, coupled with a distinct valuation discipline. The team seeks to identify companies, one-by-one, which have growing businesses, impressive fundamentals, above-average profitability, and successful managements. Such companies typically have 10% or better historical revenue and earnings growth, generate free cash flow, and have attractive financial returns that are stable or rising. DSM's macro view of the world helps inform the company choices and position sizes.

DSM Large Cap Growth Fund (DSMLX)
The DSM Large Cap Growth Fund seeks long-term capital appreciation and invests primarily in U.S. equity securities issued by large-cap companies that DSM believes offer the best opportunity for reliable growth at attractive stock valuations. The Fund may invest up to 20% of assets in ADR's of non-US domiciled companies. The Fund will generally contain 25 to 35 stocks.

About DSM
The DSM family of funds includes the DSM Large Cap Growth Fund (DSMLX), the DSM Global Growth Fund (DSMGX), the DSM Small-Mid Growth Fund (DSMMX), each having an objective of long-term capital appreciation. The DSM Global Growth & Income Fund (DSMYX) has the duel objective of long-term capital appreciation and current income.

DSM Capital Partners LLC (DSM) is the investment adviser to the funds. The DSM Mutual Funds are distributed by Quasar Distributors, LLC.

DSM employs a bottom-up, growth stock process with an intermediate to long-term investment horizon. The firm's eleven person investment team specializes in proprietary fundamental research, used to identify and model reliable growth companies, complemented by a rigorous valuation discipline used for both buying and selling positions. The valuation discipline makes DSM a growth firm with a value backbone.

DSM Capital Partners was founded in 2001 and serves as investment adviser to corporations, endowments and foundations, pensions plans, family offices, and high net worth individual investors, and registered advisors. DSM presently manages $5.6 billion in assets a/o 7/31/14 and is 100% employee owned and located at 116 Radio Circle Drive in Mount Kisco, New York.

For complete information, see http://www.dsmfunds.com

The Fund's investment objectives, risks, charges and expenses must be considered carefully before investing. The statutory and summary prospectuses contain this and other important information about the investment company, and may be obtained by calling 877-862-9555 or by visiting http://www.dsmmutualfunds.com. Read carefully before investing.

Earnings growth is not a measure of the Fund's future performance.

Free cash flow is a measure of financial performance calculated as operating cash flow minus capital expenditures.

Investments involve risk, including the potential loss of principal. The Funds may invest in foreign securities which involve greater volatility as well as political, economic and currency risks and differences in accounting methods. These risks are greater for emerging markets countries. The Funds are non-diversified meaning they may concentrate their assets in fewer individual holdings than a diversified fund. Therefore, those Funds are more exposed to individual stock volatility than a diversified fund. The funds may invest a significant portion of assets in one sector of the market which can expose the Funds to greater market risk than if those assets were spread among various sectors.

For more information on this press release visit: http://www.releasewire.com/press-releases/release-3.htm

Red Bank, NJ -- (ReleaseWire) -- 08/14/2014 -- WBI, a leading provider of innovative wealth-building strategies that seek to provide investors with an optimal blend of bear market capital preservation and bull market return, announced that Matt Woehnker has been promoted to Director of Business Development.

Mr. Woehnker joined the firm in 2012 serving as Regional Director. As Regional Director, he was responsible for increasing assets under management and growing WBI's advisor base within his sales territory. He exceeded expectations in this role, increasing assets tenfold during a ten-month timeframe. Previous work experience includes his roles as Business Development Associate at Black Rock's iShares, and Regional Consultant at Lord Abbett.

In his new role as Director of Business Development at WBI, Mr. Woehnker's responsibilities include overseeing sales and distribution in WBI's institutional channels, as well as expanding and maintaining broker-dealer relationships.

Mr. Woehnker holds a Bachelor of Science Degree in Finance from Elizabethtown College and is FINRA Series 7 and 66 registered.

About WBI
WBI is based in Red Bank, NJ and manages approximately $3 billion in assets.

For more information visit, http://www.wbiinvestments.com

For more information on this press release visit: http://www.releasewire.com/press-releases/release-3.htm

Westchester, NY -- (ReleaseWire) -- 08/05/2014 -- DSM Capital Partners LLC, a global investment management firm with $5.6 billion in AUM, which has served individual and institutional investors for over 13 years, has launched a SICAV Global Growth Fund for overseas investors, designed to mirror its Global Growth Strategy. The Fund had in excess of USD 600 million in assets at the end of second quarter 2014.

In making the announcement, Steve Memishian, CFA, Co-Managing Partner of DSM Capital, said, "We're pleased to make available to overseas investors the same global growth strategy we've employed for our domestic separately managed account clients and financial professionals."

The Fund is managed by Co-Managing Partner Daniel Strickberger and a team of nine senior analyst/portfolio managers: Justin Burk, CFA; Pinaki Kar;Paul Matlow, CFA; David McVey, CFA; Takehiko Serai, CFA; Steven Tish, CFA; Eric Woodworth, CFA; Kenneth Yang, CFA, and Ling Zhang, CFA.

The DSM Capital investment team uses a bottom-up, idea-driven, growth style with a long-term investment horizon, coupled with a distinct valuation discipline. The team seeks to identify companies, one-by-one, which have growing businesses, impressive fundamentals, above-average profitability, and successful managements. Such companies typically have 10% or better historical revenue and earnings growth, generate free cash flow, and have attractive financial returns that are stable or rising. The investment team's macro view of the world informs both company choices and position sizes.

DSM Capital Partners LLC is the Global Distributor for the Fund. DSM Capital Partners LLC is the investment manager to the Fund. RBS (Luxembourg) S.A. is the Management Company for the Fund.

Northern Trust Luxembourg Management Company S.A. is central administrator, domiciliary agent, and registrar and transfer agent for the Fund. Northern Trust Global Services Ltd, Luxembourg Branch is the custodian.

DSM SICAV Global Growth Fund

The DSM SICAV Global Growth Fund seeks long-term capital appreciation by investing primarily in global equity securities issued by large-cap companies (USD 10 billion and above). The Fund has no limit on the amount of assets it can invest in equity securities of domestic or foreign issues, including those in emerging markets. The Fund will generally contain 35 to 55 stocks.

DSM Capital employs a bottom-up, growth stock process with an intermediate to long-term investment horizon. The firm's investment team specializes in proprietary fundamental research, designed to identify and model reliable growth companies, complemented by a rigorous valuation discipline used for both buying and selling positions. The valuation discipline makes DSM Capital a growth firm with a value backbone.

About DSM Capital
DSM Capital was founded in 2001 and serves as investment adviser to corporations, endowments and foundations, pensions plans, family offices, high net worth individual investors, and registered advisors. DSM Capital presently manages $5.6billion in assets and is 100% employee owned and located at 116 Radio Circle Drive in Mount Kisco, New York. For complete information, including a free prospectus, see http://www.dsmsicav.com

There can be no guarantee that the objectives of the DSM SICAV Global Growth Sub-Fund will be achieved.

The Sub-Fund's investments are subject to normal market fluctuations and the risks inherent in all investments and there can be no assurances that appreciation will occur. It will be the policy of the Sub-Fund's to maintain a diversified portfolio of investments so as to minimize risk.

The investments of a Sub-Fund may be denominated in currencies other than the Reference Currency of that Sub-Fund. The value of those investments (when converted to the Reference Currency of that Sub-Fund) may fluctuate due to changes in exchange rates. The price of Shares and the income from them can go down as well as up and investors may not realize their initial investment.

Potential subscribers and purchasers of Shares should inform themselves as to (a) the possible tax consequences, (b) the legal requirements and (c) any foreign exchange restrictions or exchange control requirements which they might encounter under the laws of the countries of their citizenship, residence or domicile and which might be relevant to the subscription, purchase, holding, switch and disposal of Shares.

For more information on this press release visit: http://www.releasewire.com/press-releases/release-3.htm

Financial advisors should take advantage of down time this summer and do financial media relations to market their firms to investors.

New York, NY -- (ReleaseWire) -- 07/17/2014 -- New York -- 7/18/2014 -- Summer offers a great opportunity for investment advisers and money managers to get some financial media exposure in addition to sun exposure says Bill Bongiorno, President of Blue Chip Public Relations, in his latest missive to the financial industry.

Investment professionals are away from the office enjoying themselves, which means there are fewer financial sources for financial writers and editors to interview according to Mr. Bongiorno. The chances have improved greatly for breaking into some financial print stories and getting a foot in the door to being on local or national financial television for those financial advisers working. Now is how to get on CNBC. There are some great proactive steps financial professionals can take to make the most of the dog days of summer and get their name out there through media exposure to gain name recognition, visibility, credibility and expert status to attract new business.

- Break into Print

Have you been reading about the new financial regulations and shaking your head? Be proactive and voice your opinion by writing a letter to the editor in publications read by your clients. What is good and bad about the financial legislation? What don't you agree with? Include suggestions on how it can be improved. This positions you as a thought leader and expert, building credibility with target audiences. Or perhaps cover some feel good personal finance story. For example, a Tennessee client wrote a letter to the editor of her local community newspapers about her mother for Mother's Day, describing how she taught her the value of money and financial planning.

Or send an email to the editor proposing a guest column. These typically don't run more than 800 words. The email should give credentials and brief bullet points of what topics the article will cover. When sending the article, be sure to include a high resolution photo of yourself. Be sure to spell-check and proofread the article, and send it prior to the deadline given by the editor.

A trick of the PR trade is to refer to editorial calendars of financial magazines. Most financial magazines post their editorial calendars on their websites, often under the advertising section as part of their media kit. This gives a leg up to know what stories they are covering in which issues far in advance. Most magazines post their 12-month calendar of stories at the beginning of each year. If there is a topic you feel strongly about or are an expert in, why not contact the editor and offer to be a source or write a column on the topic? Be sure to reach out to the editor well in advance, say four to five months ahead of time. Often their lead time is this far in advance for a monthly publication.

Another way to gain media exposure is to offer to be a source for a blog. Many newspapers, including the Wall Street Journal have various bloggers who contribute to the paper's website. They need content for several blog entries a day, and are hungry for content and new sources. Of course with everything online, there are many opportunities to contribute articles.

Don't have the time or inclination to write a letter or column, but feel strongly about an issue in the news, another way to get exposure in the media is to offer to a reporter for a one-on-one interview. Give background, website and bio to the reporter, and send along some bullet points outlining positions on a given news item. This can be much easier than trying to come up with a news hook.

- Your Television Debut

Financial television usually follows financial print in covering news stories. If there's a big story in the Wall Street Journal, you can be sure that television will cover it as well, and often will reach out to sources in the original story. There's a better shot at getting on financial television stations such as CNBC in the summer when fewer sources are available as guests.

Once that elusive interview on CNBC is landed or another financial network, don't keep it a secret—let clients know well in advance with an email announcing the details of time, day and channel of appearance. This is a great way to show knowledge to clients, as well as demonstrating that a third party—the financial media—respects and values opinions on financial topics and considers you an expert worthy of air time. Ask clients to forward the announcement to friends and family. Be sure to send the video link of that CNBC interview as a follow-up as well for those that missed it and post to social media as well.

Another great way to leverage a financial television appearance is to write a news release announcing upcoming appearances with details and some topics to be discussed. Email it, along with a high resolution photo, to local newspapers and community weeklies. It becomes easier to approach local television stations once you've appeared on a national program, though getting some local TV experience first to get comfortable before jumping into the national scene is a good idea.

Been quoted or have written a letter or column for a publication read by your target audience and wondering what to do with the articles now, merchandise them as much as possible. Get reprints to post to websites and send to your prospect list or to existing clients as referral tools that they can give to their friends, family or business associates. It's a great way to be in touch without directly asking for anything. Additionally, it becomes an educational tool that can be used and a reason to follow up with a prospect list.

Another great use for articles is to get a foot in the door with financial television guest bookers and producers. Provide some press articles to demonstrate expert status and show that you understand what the media wants.

- Tips for working with the financial media

The first rule is to read the publications interested in being covered by. It's important to know what stories they have covered and are not likely to revisit for a while. Also, getting to know a writer's likes and dislikes will gives a leg up. Typically, writers have a "beat" that they cover, which is a certain segment of the industry. You can often find the beats for writers on publication websites under the contact link, which may also have a "beat sheet." It's important to contact the right reporters when pitching a story as a financial source. If you are looking to talk about an investing story, you want to contact the reporter who covers investing, not someone who covers the industry at large, for example. Usually, the managing editor is responsible for choosing articles that they accept from expert writers.

Learn the deadlines for publication dates of financial magazines and newspapers. For example, most monthly financial magazines are trying to "close" the issue in the last two weeks of a month, so it's better to contact the editors in the first two weeks of the month. Keep in mind that they will be closing on an issue that is a couple of months out.

While others in the financial industry are off on vacation, sunning themselves on the beach, take advantage of more media opportunities available to find the financial publications and television shows that reach your target clients. Use these public relations ideas to garner some media exposure for you and your business in order to attract assets to your firm.

About Bill Bongiorno
Bill Bongiorno is President of Blue Chip Public Relations, which has been specializing in working with financial companies since 2004. Complete information can be found at http://bluechippr.com

For more information on this press release visit: http://www.releasewire.com/press-releases/release-3.htm

Commack, NY -- (SBWIRE) -- 06/17/2014 -- Saving for the future should begin sooner rather than later says Financial Advisor Dr. H. William Wolfson.

According to Dr. Wolfson, retirement planning should begin sooner rather than later, as time is not forgiving for those who often wait. The earlier someone starts saving, the greater the opportunity to build a portfolio of assets and peace of mind. For those who think Social Security will be sufficient to meet required retirement expenses, think again, he says.

According to the U.S. Federal Reserve Board, 48% of U.S. households do not save and more glaring is the fact that over 65% of American adults do not have any emergency funds (three to six months of cash on hand to cover monthly expenses) set aside. A recent survey from the Employee Benefit Research Institute revealed that nearly a third of workers are not confident they'll have enough money to retire comfortably. To compound these findings, the retirement age for receiving full Social Security benefits is expected to creep up and life expectancies are increasing. This means someone will likely wait longer to receive full Social Security retirement benefits and will statistically live longer. In other words, proper planning now may help someone to not outlive their money cautions Dr. Wolfson.

The contribution to an IRA or Roth IRA may be done individually and unrelated to an employer's plan. However, in certain circumstances this option may be curtailed or eliminated. Assuming someone can participate in an employer's retirement plan, the options available can be overwhelming. The requirements and availability of options can be limited due to a whole host of equally daunting factors.

The intent of funding or participating in a plan is only a small part in the retirement funding puzzle. A plan that is adequate, appropriate and available to suit needs should be reviewed to determine the benefit of participating and ensure desired goal. Will there be a company match? How long before someone is fully vested? It becomes abundantly clear the choices for retirement planning and subsequent investing may become overwhelming, if not cumbersome. The need for sufficient and strategically placed assets is continual as you go through life and often unexpected events. The goal is to meet each need and have the fortitude to stay the course to reach ultimate goals says Wolfson.

Retirement planning is not the end all but a part, albeit large portion, of asset accumulation he says. In addition to attending employer educational financial presentations, it may be in someone's best interest to speak with a financial advisor or tax professional. After determining investment risk tolerance and percentage of pay to set aside, decide where best to allocate contributions among your available options. He suggests being proactive, asking questions and monitoring financial statements. Ultimately, it is an individual's responsibility to ensure retirement goals are realized.

About Dr. Wolfson
Dr. Wolfson is a financial planning educator and was awarded by The College for Financial Planning a Master Planner Advanced Studies(SM) certification.

For more information on this press release visit: http://www.releasewire.com/press-releases/release-3.htm

Westchester, NY -- (ReleaseWire) -- 06/11/2014 -- DSM Mutual Funds, a new fund family launched by DSM Capital Partners, a global investment management firm with $5.3 billion in AUM which has served individual and institutional investors for over 13 years, is pleased to celebrate the anniversary of its DSM Small-Mid Cap Growth Fund (DSMMX) which launched May of 2013 and DSM Global Growth Fund (DSMGX) which launched Spring 2012. Both funds are targeted to RIAs, foundations, pensions, and family offices.

Speaking about the fund anniversaries and growth of the fund offerings, Daniel Strickberger, Co-managing Partner of DSM Capital Partners, said, "We've been pleased to make available the same strategies we've employed for our private clients to a more broadly based audience. We look forward to expanding our investment client base in our funds as they mature and we offer more choices for portfolios."

Both Funds are managed by Co-Managing Partners Daniel Strickberger and Stephen Memishian, CFA, and a team of nine senior analyst/portfolio managers: Justin Burk, CFA; Pinaki Kar; Paul Matlow, CFA; David McVey, CFA; Takehiko Serai, CFA; Steven Tish, CFA; Eric Woodworth, CFA; Kenneth Yang, CFA, and Ling Zhang, CFA.

Both Funds' investment team uses a bottom-up, idea-driven, growth style with a long-term investment horizon, coupled with a distinct valuation discipline. The team seeks to identify companies, one-by-one, which have growing businesses, impressive fundamentals, above-average profitability, and successful managements. Such companies typically have 10% or better historical revenue and earnings growth, generate free cash flow, and have attractive financial returns that are stable or rising. DSM's macro view of the world helps inform the company choices and position sizes.

DSM Small-Mid Cap Growth Fund (DSMMX)
The DSM Small-Mid Cap Growth Fund's primary objective is to seek long- term capital appreciation by investing primarily in U.S. equity securities issued by small-cap and mid-cap companies ($500 million to $10 billion) that the advisor believes offer the best opportunity for reliable growth at attractive stock valuations. The Fund may invest up to 20% of assets in ADR's of non-US domiciled companies. The Fund's portfolio will generally contain 35 to 55 stocks.

DSM Global Growth Fund (DSMGX)
The DSM Global Growth Fund seeks long-term capital appreciation by investing primarily in global equity securities issued by mid-cap and large-cap companies ($5 billion and above) domiciled generally in the United States, other developed nations, and emerging countries, that the managers believe offer the best opportunity for reliable growth at attractive stock valuations. The Fund's portfolio will generally contain 35 to 55 stocks and will invest in local shares as well as U.S. ADR's.

About DSM
The DSM Family of Funds include DSM Large Cap Growth Fund (DSMLX), DSM Global Growth Fund (DSMGX), DSM Small-Mid Growth Fund (DSMMX) each having an objective of long-term capital appreciation, while DSM Global Growth & Income Fund (DSMYX) has the objective of long-term capital appreciation and current income.

DSM Capital Partners LLC (DSM) is the investment adviser to the funds. The DSM Mutual Funds are distributed by Quasar Distributors, LLC.

DSM employs a bottom-up, growth stock process with an intermediate to long-term investment horizon. The firm's eleven person investment team specializes in proprietary fundamental research, used to identify and model reliable growth companies, complemented by a rigorous valuation discipline used for both buying and selling positions. The valuation discipline makes DSM a growth firm with a value backbone.

DSM Capital Partners was founded in 2001 and serves as investment adviser to endowments and foundations, pensions plans, family offices, high net worth individual investors, and corporations. DSM presently manages $5.3billion in assets and is 100% employee owned and located at 116 Radio Circle Drive in Mount Kisco, New York. For complete information, see http://www.dsmfunds.com/index.html.

The Funds' investment objectives, risks, charges and expenses must be considered carefully before investing. The statutory and summary prospectuses contain this and other important information about the investment company, and may be obtained by calling 877.862.9555 or by visiting http://www.dsmmutualfunds.com. Read carefully before investing.

Earnings growth is not a measure of the funds future performance.

Free cash flow is a measure of financial performance calculated as operating cash flow minus capital expenditures.

Investments involve risk, including the potential loss of principal. The Funds may invest in foreign securities which involve greater volatility as well as political, economic and currency risks and differences in accounting methods. These risks are greater for emerging markets countries. The Funds are non-diversified meaning they may concentrate their assets in fewer individual holdings than a diversified fund. Therefore, those Funds are more exposed to individual stock volatility than a diversified fund. The funds may invest a significant portion of assets in one sector of the market which can expose the Funds to greater market risk than if those assets were spread among various sectors. The Large Cap Growth, Global Growth and Income Fund, and Small-Mid Cap Growth Fund may invest significantly in the consumer discretionary sector which is tied closely to the performance of the overall domestic and international economy, interest rates, competition and consumer confidence. The Global Growth Fund and Global Growth and Income Fund may have significant exposure in Chinese companies which include risks such as: greater government control over the economy, political and legal uncertainty, currency fluctuations or exchange limitations, the risk that China's government may decide not to continue to support economic reform programs and the risk of nationalization or expropriation of assets. Information about issuers in emerging markets, including China, may not be as complete, accurate or timely as information about listed companies in other more developed economies or markets. Investments in small to mid-sized company stocks have historically been subject to greater investment risk than large company stocks. The prices of small to mid-sized company stocks tend to be more volatile and less liquid than large company stocks.

For more information on this press release visit: http://www.releasewire.com/press-releases/release-3.htm

The American consumer is essentially tapped out. This isn't happening to just a few retailers, it's showing up across the board.

Washington, D.C. -- (ReleaseWire) -- 06/09/2014 -- Ernest Hemingway was once asked about how he went bankrupt, he said, "Two ways, gradually, then suddenly". It seems that way for the U.S., but take heart, the situation opens up a world of opportunity for those willing to see it and invest accordingly, says Dawn Bennett, CEO of Bennett Group Financial Services in her latest missive.

Evidence continues to pile up that the next recession has already begun, and at the very least, Americans in the lower and middle income brackets are feeling it the most. The United States is running out of steam and is bogged down by trillions of dollars in debt, increased regulation, and fewer jobs. It's like we are all trying to swim upstream in the middle of a biblical flood! The Unites States isn't coming to an end but it is changing dramatically in front of our eyes, says Bennett.

Here is the first piece of evidence of a recession she offers: The S&P 500 closed over 1900 on Friday, May 30, 2014, but the market is making new highs on the backs of fewer stocks. We have gone from one out of five stocks in the S&P 500 hitting new highs to one stock out of every 19 stocks that are hitting a new high. That's a tremendous amount of deterioration to the breadth of the market, which means caution is in order for investor portfolios.

The second piece of evidence was the optimism by analysts coming into the first quarter of 2014 because they said top line growth was going to grow by consensus prospective about 4 to 5% year-over-year. They missed the mark. The average top-line revenue growth came in at 0.3 percent for Dow stocks, and only 0.5 percent for non-financial stocks. Top-line lack of growth is really collapsing. This data is the single most important factor to consider when pondering the fundamentals of U.S. stocks over the remainder of 2014, because revenue growth fulfills the reasons equities are worth owning, she contends.

The third piece of evidence she points to is the apparent retail apocalypse currently happening in the United States, which will continue to escalate. The American consumer is essentially tapped out, according to Bennett. This isn't happening to just a few retailers, it's showing up across the board.

First quarter 2014 retail data points that need heeding: Walmart's numbers across the board were all down. Their profits plunged for first quarter 2014 by $220 million. Target - their profit plunged by $80 million for this first quarter of 2014, that's 16 percent lower than in 2013. Staples - their profits have plunged by 44 percent, and they're closing hundreds of stores. American Eagle- their profit was down by 86 percent. The Gap - their income dropped by 22 percent. Dollar General- a store that's supposed to do well in recessionary times- their profit plummeted by 40 percent. McDonald's- their earnings fell by $66 million. Costco- another company that's supposed to do well during recessionary times - profits declined by $84 million. JCPenney had a total loss of $358 million for the first qua rter 2014.

Unfortunately, plummeting retail sales are not the only sign that the U.S. is in its next major economic downturn says Bennett. The fourth piece of evidence, the Department of Commerce and the BEA, which is the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, reported that the U.S. gross domestic product, the GDP, in the first quarter of 2014 came in at a negative -1.0 percent. This is just the 10th time since World War II that GDP growth has been negative outside of a recession. Three of those negative quarters immediately preceded recessions.

Very few people expected a recession the last time we had it in 2008 and 2009 says Bennett. Then Federal Reserve's Chairman Ben Bernanke repeatedly promised us that we would not have a recession, but we went on to experience the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. It may be the same this time around. Just like in 2000 and 2009, we will see an endless chorus of everything-is-just-fine-and-dandy talk from the White House, Congress and the media. Most Americans will be blindsided when reality hits. We are in a recession no matter what they tell us.

The market keeps going up on bad news because the Fed continues to put money into the market, not because they should, but because that's all they can do right now. They're just whistling past the graveyard, putting money in it trying to keep the markets up, which avoids the truth. What's going on in the U.S. stock market is unsustainable, unexplainable, and groundless concludes Ms. Bennett.

Securities offered through Western International Securities, Inc. Member FINRA & SIPC. Bennett Group Financial and Western International Securities, Inc. are separate & unaffiliated companies.

All market data references are sourced to Bloomberg terminal database.

About Bennett Group Financial Services LLC
Bennett Group Financial Services LLC, based in Washington, D.C., is a comprehensive financial services firm committed to providing opportunities to clients' as they seek long-term financial success. Its customized programs are designed with the potential to help grow, lower overall risk and conserve client assets by delivering a high level of personalized service and skill. For more information, call 866-286-2268 or visit http://www.bennettgroupfinancial.com.

Dawn Bennett is CEO and Founder of Bennett Group Financial Services. She hosts a national radio program on http://www.WMAL.com called Financial Myth Busting http://www.financialmythbusting.com. She can be reached on Twitter @DawnBennettFMB or on Facebook Financial Myth Busting with Dawn Bennett or dbennett@bennettgroupfinancial.com

For more information on this press release visit: http://www.releasewire.com/press-releases/release-3.htm

Washington, D.C. -- (ReleaseWire) -- 06/06/2014 -- Two weeks ago the SkyBridge Conference, also known as SALT, took place in Las Vegas. This annual conference is committed to facilitating debates and discussions on macroeconomic trends within the context of the global economy by bringing together some of the brightest minds in economics, money management, politics, and the U.S. military. This year there were some very poignant thoughts that pertain to investors in the U.S. stock and bond markets.

David Tepper, a $20 billion hedge fund manager, made major headlines by saying, "I'm nervous about the market. There are times to make money, and this is a time not to lose money. It's a nervous time. The market is dangerous now."

David Rubenstein, Co-CEO of the Carlyle Group, said "The U .S. markets are not cheap, and it's very difficult to find deals in the buy-out world." That's not a good sign. Following Rubenstein was former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, who said, "We are not at the end of financial instability."

Nassim Taleb, the New York Times best-selling author of "The Black Swan," who most recently wrote a paper entitled "Skin in the Game," argues that the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, unfairly rewarded what he called "bad actors," and that the U.S. economic system still remains dangerous. He went on to say, "If you want to take on risk, go to any hedge fund, you're going to have a ton of risk." His take on the U.S. market place was, "Not enough people paid the price for 2008." This makes us wonder what we are heading into says Dawn Bennett, CEO of Bennett Group Financial Services. Is he saying that not enough people actually learned from 2008, and that we have to relearn that lesson again? she asks.

Lastly, this from former Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou, "Greece is just muddling through" So says Bennett, with all the media talk about how the central banks are saying things are getting better, well, it's not true, because as these comments show, across the board, that the developed economies are not improving. And as we all know, "muddling through" does not mean getting better, it just means going through the movements and getting nowhere fast.

Bennett says that sums up many of the important ideas and thoughts that came out of SALT regarding the markets, and it certainly doesn't sound like optimism. Everyone can pretend that everything is fine and dandy because the Dow keeps hitting new highs, but in reality, some of the smartest and brightest economists and money managers know better and are speaking the truth.

More fodder for the fire to contemplate for preparing investment portfolios for some probable downside is Walmart. The company reported earnings and missed every one of their numbers across the board, and even guided lower for next quarter. Walmart for the past five decades has been the retailer competitors fear the most. As a result, it has been a phenomenal investment for its shareholders. That's changing rapidly. Walmart reported first quarter earnings per share of $1.10, which was below the $1.15 expected.

The reasons the company stated for not making earnings expectations were the weather, ObamaCare and taxes which hurt their revenues of $114.96 billion, which were below the $116.30 billion anticipated. The Walmart stock took a nosedive because shareholders are not happy with this outcome. Typically, Walmart has performed well during both solid economic times and in bad economic times. Therefore, is Walmart another canary in the coalmine for U.S. investment portfolios? asks Bennett.

The home-builder confidence indicator came out the same week, and it plunged to a 12-month low, and for the fifth month in a row, this survey missed expectations, at 45 versus 49. This is the lowest National Home Builders survey since May 2013, which illuminates the true reality of home sales and mortgage applications.

Another indicator reported that week was the University of Michigan Confidence Index, which dropped and missed expectations by the most since June of 2006. This is the greatest amount of misses in eight years. Why does this mean anything? Higher highs in stock prices and lower highs in confidence are not exactly what a stock investor wants; it's a negative sign, says Bennett. Confidence is the key number to have positive returns for continued exuberance and a fueled multiple expansion. Current levels of consumer sentiment need to be almost double for the U.S. equity markets to approach historical multiple valuation levels.

Her suggestion for U.S. investor portfolios is to raise the sell stops on all equity positions, and be prepared to take profits or limit losses if positions start to fall. The adage, "Sell in May and go away," may just be sage advice this year. Stay bearish as this market continues to melt up. "This inflated stock market is the Fed's creation, but it's investors problems," she said.

All market data references are sourced to Bloomberg terminal database.

Securities offered through Western International Securities, Inc. Member FINRA & SIPC. Bennett Group Financial and Western International Securities, Inc. are separate & unaffiliated companies.

About Dawn Bennett
Dawn Bennett is CEO and Founder of Bennett Group Financial Services. She hosts a national radio program on www.WMAL.com called Financial Myth Busting http://www.financialmythbusting. com. She can be reached on Twitter @DawnBennettFMB or on Facebook Financial Myth Busting with Dawn Bennett or dbennett@bennettgroupfinancial.com

Bennett Group Financial Services LLC, based in Washington, D.C., is a comprehensive financial services firm committed to providing opportunities to clients' as they seek long-term financial success. Its customized programs are designed with the potential to help grow, lower overall risk and conserve client assets by delivering a high level of personalized service and skill.

For more information on this press release visit: http://www.releasewire.com/press-releases/release-3.htm

He spoke about why Americans should ditch their dollars for gold, how Janet Yellen is affecting Americans retirements, and what China and Russia are up to with their gold buying and de-dollarization meetings.

Washington, DC -- (ReleaseWire) -- 05/27/2014 -- Nationally Syndicated Financial Myth Busting Radio Show with Host Dawn Bennett, CEO of Bennett Group Financial Services, LLC, on May 18, 2014, interviewed Ed Moy, Chief Strategist of Morgan Gold and Former Director of the U.S. Mint, about why Americans should just ditch their dollars for gold, how Janet Yellen is affecting Americans retirements, and what China and Russia are up to with their gold buying and de-dollarization meetings.

The show airs live on http://www.WMAL.com each Sunday at 11 am EDT. It now has over a year's worth of achieved interviews for listeners free on-demand at http://www.financialmythbusting.com.

Dawn discusses educational topics and events in the financial news, along with her thoughts on the economy, financial markets, investments, and more with her live guests, who have included Rock Legend Ted Nugent, as well as Steve Forbes and Grover Norquist. Listeners can call 855-884-DAWN as well as take podcasts on the road and forums for interaction. The show is a great complement to Dawn's monthly investing seminars that take place at Tysons Corner in McLean, VA, where she discusses investing.

Ed Moy is Chief Strategist of Morgan Gold and a former director of the U.S. Mint. After being nominated by President Bush, Moy served as the 38th Director of the United States Mint from 2006 to 2011. Other positions he held in the Bush administration was the Director of Managed Care at the Health Care Financing Administration as well as the Special Assistant to President George W. Bush for Presidential Personnel, where he oversaw the selection of candidates for presidential appointments from 2001 to 2006.

Today Moy is a frequent contributor to moneynews.com. His most recent article is titled, "Rising Gold Prices Hinge on 3 Events." He began this article with a question, "With the bull market recording new records and investors discounting Ukraine, will gold prices decline?"

Q: Will gold prices decline from here? At least according to the media, everything appears well in the world.

A: Yes there's a lot of bias out there but at minimum there are very fragile and incremental recoveries in both America and Europe. China is teetering downwards. From an economic perspective, it's certainly not robust growth that everyone's looking for. There is also have a huge increase in geopolitical risk. Iran is marching toward nuclear capability and Syria is out of control. There's a lot of global risk. With how fast technology works, when that risk happens, you can have immediate impact on the markets.

Q: Do you feel there's a potential that exists for an epic short squeeze in physical gold?

A: Yes, this happened over the past 18 months, a huge short squeeze on gold. India and China are buying historic record amounts of gold, pushing overall gold demand to the highest it's ever been in the history of the world. These enormous trading pressures result in a lot of volatility.

Q: Ed, it's no secret that Russia has been pushing for trade arrangements that minimize the participation of the U.S. dollar ever since the onset of the Ukraine crisis. China and Iran are participating in these de-dollarization meetings. Do you think they will get away with it? Is Russia actually going to replace the dollar with the dollar-free system?

A: I don't think that any of that will happen in the near term, but you can see the broader strategy. China has made public statements saying it is time to de-Americanize the world.

Q: Let's start with the dollar. China and Russia have made similar statements but on the side they have been buying huge amounts of gold to add to their gold reserves. They're up to something and I think what they're moving toward is some type of market basket of currencies to which they'd like their currencies to be part. They want to t ake away America's dominance of the dollar as the world's reserve currency. I think that's the ultimate midterm goal that they're working toward and I think they have a reasonable chance of pulling it off as long as the United States under this particular administration seems to be withdrawing from engagement in the world and letting these things go on.

The Chinese may be preparing to introduce the gold-backed renminbi, which would push down the dollar and get rid of the U.S. status. Do you think that's possible?

A: I think that's possible, but it's a huge jump for China right now, because overall, when you take a look at this amount of currency that they have and the amount of gold reserves that they have, we don't know exactly how much they have in their gold reserve but it's a small percentage. The United States has a larger percentage than that. So they have some way to go as far as buying enough gold to be able to execute that.

Q: Let's talk about what we have in gold reserve. Back in 2011, Ron Paul proposed some legislation to have an annual audit, it was called the Gold Reserve Transparency Act. It didn't advance but there was a lot of talk in the media, and there still is, that the last audit done on our gold reserves was actually back in 1974. So is the gold really there?

A: Yes. One of my responsibilities as Mint Director is to oversee our gold reserves, of which a big chunk of it is in Fort Knox. I've been to Fort Knox multiple times, at least once a year to visit the staff there, do town hall meetings, and to also take a look at the gold. We also worked very closely with the Inspector General and our Chief Financial Officer at the United States Mint, do annual audits. Not to the extent that Ron Paul had wanted before he left office, but, still the audits are done and I can tell you that the amount of gold that is written up and audited in the Inspector General's report is exactly the amount of gold in Fort Knox. We also have gold reserv es in our West Point Mint, in New York, and we also have some gold reserves in the Denver Mint. Together, those three comprise about 98 percent of our nation's gold reserves.

Q: So that myth was just busted, thank you. The U.S. Mint was established by the Coinage Act of 1792. One of the interesting facets of the law was that people found guilty of debasing the dollar could be sentenced to death.

Thomas Jefferson wrote that "Paper is poverty. It is only the ghost of money and not money itself." Do you think we've lost sight of The Founders' intent on how America's money should work?

A: Yes. Once we went off the gold standard, which had been in a steady decline from about 1933 'til 1972, and government figured out that no one objected to being able to print money with no backing, they thought, "What a great deal!"

Q: But if you're sitting in the citizen's shoes, you're asking, "Who will pay for all this?"

A: Yes, right, exactly. Jefferson and Madison knew eventually paper money with some questionable backing would be printed, so they gave people an out, allowing the settlement of debts with silver and gold, which is the Constitution. Twelve different states have the ability to have American-made gold and silver bullion coins as a medium of exchange, which is constitutionally allowed.

Q: Back to people found guilty of debasing the dollar being sentenced to death. The Coinage Act of 1792 is still in place. How do you feel about that regarding Greenspan, Bernanke and Yellen?

A: Now that we have this atmosphere in government, based on the leadership of this administration that laws are optional to enforce, good luck with carrying out that one. I don't think anyone in government is will want to explore it.

Q: I bet not. Janet Yellen now is effectively in control of managing the value of the dollar. She said in her most recent congressional testimony that she's worried inflation is not high enough and that the Fed is prepared to take action if inflation remains too low. What does this kind of policy mean for the average American?

A: Guard your pocketbook because in the end, Wall Street will benefit and Main Street's will be hurt.

Q: What could they do to help hedge themselves against this?

A: The reason why the Fed is taking such a strong position is they have legislative authority to manage monetary policy, which goes hand-in-hand with fiscal policy which drives all of the economic policy because that's made by elected officials.

The President and Congress can't even get a budget done, and as a result, the Fed has felt an obligation to fill in the gap, and that's why this unbalance of power exists in Washington. So citizens should be electing more effective representatives and a President that's willing to tackle these tough issues.

Q: But what do you think they should be doing with their investment portfolios?

A: Diversify, diversify, diversify.

Q: If we have inflation, what's your suggestion?

A: Consider gold because out of the four asset classes, cash, stocks, bonds, all those are dollar denominated and dependent on the U.S. dollar. If you have inflation, those assets will be worth less over time. If investors want something in their portfolios that moves in the opposite direction of inflation, historically that's what gold has done. When the dollar's gone down, gold has gone up. Investors want enough gold in a portfolio as an insurance policy to protect against what inflation might do to the rest of the portfolio.

Q: I consider myself a gold bull, not a gold bug and I believe there's a long-term trend for gold, which is why I'm a gold bull. So the risks/rewards setup from where I sit is rather favorable. Heads I win, tails I win type of situation. Do you agree with that?

A: I absolutely agree. When you take a look at the fundamentals, they favor gold right now. All this $5 trillion of excess liquidity that the Fed has to figure out a way to get out of our economy without sparking inflation, I think that's a huge risk that will spark inflation. Gold is a great long-term hedge against that. Speaking as the former Mint Director, I'm not smart enough to make money by daily trading of gold. I look at gold in the long-term, and the fundamentals point very positively toward holding gold in the long-term, which is why I have a bunch of it in my gold IRA but I also have a bunch of it in my portfolio.

Q: I also believe it's possible to accumulate wealth by buying gold in this environment, but 2013 threw a lot of people off this track, right?

A: Yes because it was not trading normally.

Q: It felt like it was being manipulated. What were your thoughts on that, and do you think that we've kind of cleaned up that issue?

A: Manipulated, yes, absolutely. Here's where the manipulation comes in. It's the Fed's 3-1/2 rounds of quantitative easing. It has greatly distorted both the gold and equity markets. It has fueled what I believe is an overpriced stock market because that money isn't going to people getting mortgages to buy houses or companies to expand their plan, it's going right from the financial institution to the stock market. I do think that manipulations happen, but with the tapering of quantitative easing, it's beginning to get that effect out, but there is still $5 trillion of stimulus to worry about. I think that manipulation's happening and once that manipul ation goes, fundamentals will overrule. I think gold is positioned very well with that.

Q: Do you think that the manipulation is going away now, or do you think it's already gone? The world called them on it at the end of 2013.

A: It's beginning to go and I think the tapering is certainly a step in the right direction.

Q: Once they begin unwinding the program, the big impact will be felt. So, you're working at Morgan Gold right now, does the current price of gold accurately reflect the demand for precious metals or do you think it should be higher?

A: It should be much higher. When you take a look at the demand for physical metal, it is huge, setting world records. What you're seeing here in the West is a bit of a Western bias. People have to separate individual investors and institutional investors. Institutional investors in the West have abandoned gold, and as a result, the ETFs that they normally invest in have sold that gold, and almost all of it has gone to India and China. They must love our manipulation because they've been taking advantage of it hand over fist. Gold has gained seven percent this year and is the second best performing investment this year so far.

Q: How does today's dollar differ from the dollar our Founders created?

A: The dollar our Founders created was totally backed by gold and silver. Today, it is backed on the full faith and credit of the United States government.

Q: Do you think we should go back to a gold standard?

A: The gold standard would be great, but anything that would get the government away from the mentality of thinking they can print money endlessly with no consequence would be welcome.

About Bennett Group Financial Services LLC
Bennett Group Financial Services LLC, based in Washington, D.C., is a comprehensive financial services firm committed to providing opportunities to clients' as they seek long-term financial success. Its customized programs are designed with the potential to help grow, lower overall risk and conserv e client assets by delivering a high level of personalized service and skill. For more information, call 866-286-2268 or visit http://www.bennettgroupfinancial.com.

Securities offered through Western International Securities Inc. (WIS), member FINRA/SIPC. BGFS and WIS are separate and unaffiliated entities.

About Dawn Bennett
Dawn Bennett is CEO and Founder of Bennett Group Financial Services. She hosts a national radio program on www.WMAL.com called Financial Myth Busting http://www.financialmythbusting.com. She can be reached on Twitter @DawnBennettFMB or on Facebook Financial Myth Busting with Dawn Bennett or dbennett@bennettgroup financial.com

For more information on this press release visit: http://www.releasewire.com/press-releases/release-3.htm

Investors need to ask themselves; is there anything left in the world that is truly transparent?

Washington, DC -- (ReleaseWire) -- 05/22/2014 -- We used to think about investing as a safe, smart way to steadily accumulate wealth, but this is not your father's stock market says Dawn Bennett, CEO and Founder of Bennett Group Financial Services. She says the holy grail of the trading world is high-frequency trading and dark pools. More from Ms. Bennett: Investors need to ask themselves; is there anything left in the world that is truly transparent?

Look no further than the U.S. stock market. It's blatantly happening right in front of our eyes, yet we can't see it, can't touch it, but every day it's stealing money from our pockets. The U.S. stock market is rigged beyond anyone's wildest imagination.

High-frequency trading and dark pools are bilking the typical American investor, pension, and hedge funds out of their hard-earned cash. It's cheating. Just as in life, everyth ing has a dark side. This too, is a secret membership to a place where very few can go, and it's these few that are benefiting 100 percent from something the rest of us don't, and will never, have access to. Without public access, it puts the public at a financial disadvantage. High-frequency trading and dark pools are destroying the illusion that there are still fair and equal financial markets.

High-frequency trading is a computerized parasite, and like the parasites that exist in nature, they are models of efficiency. They adapt to survive, and are the most consistent sour ce of alpha in financial markets. High-frequency trading is a computerized infrastructure that hijacks financial markets from the common day-to-day investor. So, what does that mean to an investor's portfolio?

An investor will never get a better price than their limit price. This has turned actively managed order execution and tactical portfolio decision making from a source of profit into a trade-after-trade skinning alive process. No matter how hard an investor tries to manage trades, regardless of how closely one watches stock selection, the average investor will never win. It's as if anyone on the other side of a trade has an electronic surveillance bug planted to overhear the trades and picks off the limit orders. The price the investor was secretly willing to pay for a share of ABC stock is stolen, meaning someone else is always going to be one step ahead of an investor. The investor will lose every time.

Dark pools are the other enemy of investor portfolios. Many believe they are actually more of a serious threat to investors due to the increasing amounts of trading that is now happening outside of the stock exch anges. Both academics and regulators alike, believe that so much trading is now happening away from stock exchanges that publicly quoted prices no longer correctly reflect their true value. This could cost investors far more dough than the front running tricks of high-frequency trading.

The darkest side of the stock market is where dark pools allow the biggest boys to trade high volumes of liquidity without the public actually knowing. These are anonymous, public-hidden trades by the biggest financial institutions agreeing between themselves directly on the price and the vol ume to be traded without making it known to the public. It is as if the U.S. stock market has been turned into a wild west of dueling algorithms and there are only a few gun slingers that have a special advantage. This puts the average investor portfolio at a disadvantage and is killing off the American Dream of being able to intelligently invest money into the stock market and be rewarded for finding an undervalued company that has a bright future. Today's trading is hardly so straight forward.

The American Dream seems to be gone for 99 percent of all Amer ican investors, except for the happy 1 percent of the big boys that are enjoying the tailwind of the stock market through their exclusive use of high-frequency trading and dark pools. The questions you should be asking yourself are: Do we need a new stock market so we all have the chance to achieve the American Dream? Is the American Dream dead for everyone but a happy few?

One has to wonder why U.S. regulators are dodging the truth about high-frequency trading and dark pools. Obviously the stock market is rigged. This makes regul ators who stood by and watched this happen, complicit. Last week, Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Head Mary Jo White actually solemnly promised Congress under oath that the markets are not rigged, and then two days later, the SEC slaps the wrists of the New York Stock Exchange with a $4.5 million fine for allowing market rigging for a period of time from 2008 to 2012. It is like we as a nation keep insisting that the Emperor's new clothes are splendid when in fact all this time he has been running around buck naked.

The SEC is saying that for five years the New York Stock Exchange was running a rigged market and then they swear rigging doesn't exist. Maybe it isn't just the stock market that is rigged. Maybe the entire status quo is rigged. If our entire system isn't rigged then why are insolvent banks and bankers protected from self-created destruction of capitalism? If the risky bets that John Doe or Jane Doe made affected a nation in an adverse way, they would be in jail. It's like we have become a nation that has turned a blind eye to legalized looting that is high-frequency trading and dark pools.

Financial mar kets need a massive overhaul, but don't think it will be the SEC that does it because that would be too destabilizing. Perhaps institutions, the biggest mutual funds and pension and hedge funds need to exert some form of pressure on the exchanges to stop giving advantages to the dark pools and the high-frequency traders. Why is high-frequency trading legal? It's considered by some to be insider trading and front running, and those responsible aren't going to jail, but it's obviously criminal. This completely deteriorates any faith anyone would have in the fairness of the system, and it's not American and it's not even capitalism, it's cheating.

Securities offered through Western International Securities, Inc. Member FINRA & SIPC. Bennett Group Financial and Western International Securities, Inc. are separate & unaffiliated companies.

About Dawn Bennett
Dawn Bennett is CEO and Founder of Bennett Group Financial Services. She hosts a national radio program on http://www.WMAL.com called Financial Myth Busting http://www.financialmythbusting. com. She can be reached on Twitter @DawnBennettFMB or on Facebook Financial Myth Busting with Dawn Bennett or dbennett@bennettgroupfinancial.com

Bennett Group Financial Services LLC, based in Washington, D.C., is a comprehensive financial services firm committed to providing opportunities to clients' as they seek long-term financial success. Its customized programs are designed with the potential to help grow, lower overall risk and conserve client assets by delivering a high level of personalized service and skill.

For more information on this press release visit: http://www.releasewire.com/press-releases/release-3.htm

Peterffy is the man who built the first electronic trading computer that inputted rapid-fire orders on the NASDAQ electronic stock exchange in 1987. Nohe worries that they have too much advantage and influence over the financial market.

Washington, DC -- (SBWIRE) -- 05/21/2014 -- Nationally Syndicated Financial Myth Busting Radio Show with Host Dawn Bennett, CEO of Bennett Group Financial Services, LLC, on May 11, 2014, interviewed Thomas Peterffy, the founder and head of Interactive Brokers, an online discount brokerage firm with offices all over the world.

The show airs live on http://www.WMAL.com each Sunday at 11 am EDT. It now has over a year's worth of achieved interviews for listeners free on-demand at http://www.financialmythbusting.com.

Dawn discusses educational topics and events in the financial news, along with her thoughts on the economy, financial markets, investments, and more with her live guests, who have included Rock Legend Ted Nugent, as well as Steve Forbes and Grover Norquist. Listeners can call 855-884-DAWN as well as take podcasts on the road and forums for interaction. The show is a great complement to Dawn's monthly investing seminars that take plac e at Tysons Corner in McLean, VA, where she discusses investing.

Thomas Peterffy is the founder and head of Interactive Brokers, an online discount brokerage firm with offices all over the world. With a net worth of $6.4 billion, Thomas is the 248th wealthiest billionaire in the world, and the 65th on the Forbes 400. His personal story to this point in life is all about the true American Dream. Peterffy emigrated to the United States from Hungary as a refugee in 1965 to escape communism. When he first arrived in New York City, he did not speak English. With hard work and dedication, he started Interactive Brokers, a business that employs thousands of people worldwide. Peterffy is also the man who built what could be called the first electronic trading computer that inputted rapid-fire orders on the NASDAQ elect ronic stock exchange in 1987. Now, however, he worries that they have too much advantage and influence over the financial market.

Q: So, there's a debate out there about liquidity versus illiquidity when we talk about high-frequency trading, and Morgan Stanley recently estimated that 84 percent of all stock trading is done using high-speed trading programs. Proponents of HFT say that it actually makes markets more liquid and increases depth, but now I understand that high-frequency traders are actually moving to the currency markets because stock volume has shrunk too much, and the FX has ongoing liquidity which allows for algorithmic trading to flourish. Is this the truth? Does it make our markets more liquid, or does it make them more illiquid?

A: There is a lot to say for both sides, but let me first make it very clear that in my view, the electronifications of the market has been extremely beneficial for individual investors, because, due to automation, brokers have become a great deal more efficient, and errors have been largely eliminated, and the cost of servicing customers has dras tically diminished. As an example, 15 years ago, if you wanted to do a trade, you would have to call your broker, give him your order, half an hour later he would call you back and tell you if he executed your order and at what price, and at the end you would end up with a commission bill of $50 or $100. So, you can compare that to today, when someone enters your order on your trading screen and get a confirmation within the same second. In the first quarter, for example, Interactive Brokers executed 582,000 customer trades on the average day, and all this automation saved us so much money that we were able to do this at the commission rate of $2.36 per trade.

Now, that is not to say that there are no problems with the markets. There are, and they should be fixed. I think that when brokers trade, again, their customers' orders or sell their customers' orders to other people who trading as them have a conflict of interest, and that is very difficult to overcome, and the investors would be well-advised not to use brokers who do that. Now, there is also the issue of high-frequency trading. It is somewhat unclear what high-frequency trading is. It's probably a combination of very fast and frequent trading that is not necessarily supportive or stable in liquid markets. Some high-frequency traders claim that they provide liquidity, on the other hand, we do have evidence that some of them take liquidity.

Q: So, where are they in the balance? I look at high-frequency traders as parasites who exact a toll from investors. I think they harm investors in two ways. One is by front running investors orders. That means that they, by whatever means, detect that the buyer is coming, slowly creeping down the wire, to take a prevailing offer. They send in a buyer there that is much faster and gets the offer before the original buyer there would get that, and will trade with that buyer there, the original buyer there, at the higher price and pocket the difference.

That is clearly harmful to investors. The other harm they cause is more indirect. They compete with market makers who are continuously providing liquidity bids below and offers above the market. They compete with them while the markets are stable, and they provide and trade against them when the markets move. This prompts market makers to decrease the liquidity they provide in moving markets and ultimately makes trading more expensive. This is the explanation for periodic sudden violent price runs in the markets like flash crashes and those fat-finger trading days.

A: That's correct.

Q: And Knight Capital, that type of situation?

A: That would have been hard to stop because that was a huge avalanche of orders, but many crashes and many runups happen. Big price spikes happen all the time and almost every day, and that's because the conventional market maker, who used to spend there and make continuous bids and offers is no longer there, at least not to the extent that it used to be.

Q: So does high-frequency trading actually erase competition and make this a zero-sum game for just the typical retail investor?

A: High-frequency traders compete with market makers, and that means in stable markets, they crowd them out to the extent that they provide a narrower market, and that is good for investors. But at the moment that the market starts moving, they immediately unload the position that they got into, and that moves the markets ahead of the investors, and so th e investors have to effectively act on a much wider market than they normally would, so unbalanced high-frequency traders appear to be harmful to investors.

Q: What about regulators who just can't seem to keep up with high-frequency trading? Has technology and market structure evolved so quickly that their capacity to understand or control it is just not there?

A: That's absolutely correct. It's individual ingenuity on the part of some computer programmers that makes it hard to deal with, so we need certain regulations to deal with the minutiae of these issues. I would like to see the SEC mandate trading venues and exchanges to hold every order that would be removing liquidity, to hold it for up to 200 milliseconds, in a random time period. That would make it unpredictable for high-frequency traders as to what will happen to their orders, and they would desist from removing liquidity. To the extent that they add liquidity, it would not interfere with their activities, so markets would become more stable. This would be a very simple rule to implement, and I do not understand why they won't do it.

Q: Have they ever approached you to get your ideas about what they could do?

A: Under the old administration, they d id, under Mary Schapiro. The new Chairman and I have not had the opportunity to speak yet.

Q: Now that high-frequency trading is actually in the open, what about dark pool trading danger? The darkest side of the stock market is dark pools of liquidity which allow financiers to trade high volumes of liquidity without the public knowing. Is HFT only the tip of the iceberg as growing volumes of shares are actually traded in dark pools now?

A: There's a good side and a bad side to dark pools. Dark pools were originally conceived for large traders who would have very large positions to move and they didn't want to show their hand. So, they made a bid or an offer into a dark pool which would not be shown, and therefore people would not be frightened away from their size, and then brokers would go and broker the dark pools, looking if there was a bid or an offer there. If there was, they would just trade with that bid and offer, and often that bid and offer was better than the one that was shown in the marketplace. That is a valid use for dark pools. Unfortunately, there are also traders w ho then use dark pools to internalize individual customer orders or smaller orders, and that is not a good thing.

Q: So high frequency trading and dark pools are a higher form of capitalism, or is it just cheating?

A: It's both. Unfortunately with all these things people have to be good and responsible. Freedom allows you to do bad things and allows you to do good things, and then we clamp down on them, unfortunately, we clamp down on both. So, let's hope that it's on balance, a good thing.

Q: Thomas, you got your start on Wall Street after buying your seat on the American Stock Exchange in the 1970s, an exchange that was swallowed up by the New York Stock Exchange. We're seeing capital markets consolidating all over the world. Is this trend positive?

A: It is positive because when all the liquidity comes together, there is more grease to make sure the transactions happen in a smooth and liquid market. On balance that definitely is a good thing, and as a global marketplace we live on, that's good for people around the globe.

Q: You became well known following your epic ad in the 2012 campaign, which is on YouTube. It described you growing up in communist Hungary, talking about how you felt America was actually going in the wrong direction, a direction of socialism and communism. What are your thoughts two years later, and are you in even greater despair about the way that the United States is going?

A: I certainly am, although I'm hopeful that maybe in the midterm elections we can turn the direction in which we're going, at least to some extent. I'm extremely worried about socialism coming to the so-called developed world, in Europe and the United States. I think people are just blindfolded and they don't look back and they don't look at what happens after all these big turns. After the French Revolution or the revolutions running through Europe in the mid 1800s, and then what happened in Russia after the first World War, and then what happened in eastern Europe after the second World War. It's always the same story. People are unwilling to learn from it because they have this crazy idea of social justice, which is beautiful, but then eventually you have use things to enforce it.

About Bennett Group Financial Services LLC
Bennett Group Financial Services LLC, based in Washington, D.C., is a comprehensive financial services firm committed to providing opportunities to clients' as they seek long-term financial success. Its customized programs are designed with the potential to help grow, lower overall risk and conserve client assets by delivering a high level of personalized service and skill. For more information, call 866-286-2268 or visit http://www.bennettgroupfinancial.com.

Securities offered through Western International Securities Inc. (WIS), member FINRA/SIPC. BGFS and WIS are separate and unaffiliated entities.

About Dawn Bennett
Dawn Bennett is CEO and Founder of Bennett Group Financial Services. She hosts a national radio program on http://www.WMAL.com called Financial Myth Busting http://www.financialmythbusting.com. She can be reached on Twitter @DawnBennettFMB or on Facebook Financial Myth Busting with Dawn Bennett or dbennett@bennettgroupfinancial.com

For more information on this press release visit: http://www.releasewire.com/press-releases/release-3.htm

Whether an advisor or an RIA, if a website doesn't have a clear and compelling purpose, it's likely a waste of time and money.

Ontario, Canada -- (ReleaseWire) -- 05/08/2014 -- According to Kirk Lowe, Founder and Chief Branding Tactician at TactiBrand, a tactical branding and engagement firm, whether it's an advisor or an RIA, if the website doesn't have a clear and compelling purpose for the business, it likely is a waste of time and money.

Financial advisors have traditionally relied on a professional service to either implement a template or custom design a website. As an expert on managing wealth; advisors feel they shouldn't have to be a digital marketing expert too. However, it's not easy finding trusted help that knows the financial business.

Financial website providers often:

- Don't know the industry and therefore they either require a lot of learning that increases fees, they rely on the client too much for content and direction, which also increases costs, or they build a version of what the advisor down the street is using.

- Are technical experts, not marketing experts. They focus on bells and whistles such as calculators, article libraries, stock market tickers, and newsletter sign ups. They are great at getting a site for what appears to be a reasonable price, but the real cost is actually huge. These sites typically have a huge opportunity-loss cost by missing out on attracting and resonating to with a specific audience. Bells and whistles don't attract clients, a clear value proposition that resonates with their situation does.

- Produce volumes of financial websites, seminar marketing and content. There's often more value in this approach than any above but for most firms, it leaves them wanting and needing much more. The biggest issue is looking like everyone else, having access to the same generic content as everyone else and really not standing out in any area such as design, content or message. They produce average websites that appeal to their average clients (FAs). That's just what the "volume" business is. Mass produced websites with accompanying content are not what financial advisors need to get real results from their website.

10 Reasons Why an Advisor Website Needs a Makeover

#1 – Lack Focus
Many sites have a lack of focus. They jump from one idea to the next or one service to ten. It's as if they forget who they are marketing to. A site (design and content) and its message need to be highly relevant to a target the audience.

#2 – Lack Appeal
Website layouts and designs have improved significantly with the advent of content management systems such as Wordpress and Joomla, but now advisors are forced to put their ideas and content into a template that isn't suitable for their audience, message and purpose. Mass produced website templates continue to lack good design and intuitive navigation. Even with their recent upgrades in content (generic financial videos) and social media integration. Content needs to drive the template – not the other way around.

#3 – Lack Purpose
A website can-be, should-be, a key driver for a financial business. This might include prospecting objectives, client communication or brand awareness. Regardless, it's critical to know its role in ales, service and marketing process before building. Is the site aimed at getting people to attend regional workshops? Is it aimed at influencing social media networks? Is the site aimed at impressing 50+ aged advisors to join your RIA? Is it integrated with a radio program and or book? Is the website a place you want prospects coming back to time and again? Are you looking to build credibility or are you looking to build your client base?

#4 – Lack Depth
Depth is the single most significant deficiency with all types of financial websites. From the large broker dealers, to the RIA to the independent advisor website, they lack proof they are what they say with any kind of depth. They are shallow marketing copy heavy online brochures. When most consumers look at an RIA website that says, "We are Trusted Advisors", without clear proof or support, they think yeah right. Financial companies and professionals rarely showcase how they are different; with highly relevant papers or articles, video, clearly articulated investment philosophies, diagramed planning or investment process, a book, a consistent message throughout, a clear niche, and a clear target audience. Depth builds trust and people need to trust before considering next steps. Trust is not achieved by writing, "our clients trust us" on a website. Too often websites say, "we do this and that" when they should be answering "and this is how we do it, who we do it for, and why".

#5 – Lack Engagement
One of the most important roles for most websites is user engagement. This is the equivalent of a call-to-action, but its purpose isn't limited to "call us". Engagement is getting an ideal prospect (website visitor) to click on something to learn more about a firm's insights or to begin experiencing what it would be like to be a client. Engagement keeps visitors on a site longer, gets them experiencing the firm and builds trust.

#6 – Lack Differentiation
Next to lack of depth, differentiation is the next most deficient, although important, website attribute. In an industry that seems similar in many ways to many people, being seen as different can't be marginalized or ignored. To the general consumer, all FIs are the same – unless they have a compelling reason to choose an financial advisor, they will gravitate towards a brand they recognize that is 5 minutes closer to drive to. Finding and articulating uniqueness in a way that resonates and seems different or better, is critical to people wanting to take next steps. A website is often the first place they go before they ever speak with or visit a company.

#7 – Lack Visibility
A successful website can fulfill a simple role such as impressing people that were referred and motivating them to take next step. Even if that was its only role and the website performed and it did that well, there would be a high return on investment. A successful website can also be one that attracts ideal prospects to a website and influences them to the point where they contact you. This initial attraction strategy can be achieved via search engine optimization, social networking, public relations, direct advertising, online ads, print ads, media ads, email campaigns and personal introductions. The best tactics for increasing visibility are having great content (papers, posts, checklists, etc), content online (website, blog, content hubs), and then sharing via social networks. Public relations would be a good add-on here too.

#8 – Lack Visuals
Showing how someone is different through visuals and video is huge to having marketing success. There's a specific "how we do it" that needs to be addressed. People like processes, it breeds confidence; it says, "they've done this before". It also helps people understand what is being done so they feel informed. Using visuals (diagrams, videos, infographics) to describe how and what a company does is crucial.

#9 – Lack Mobile Readiness
It's expected that mobile viewing of one's website will surpass desktop viewing within a few years. If a website is meant to impress on a desktop or laptop, it ought to achieve the same results on a mobile phone or tablet.

#10 – Lack Creativity
Websites are an incredible tool to build a brand and grow a business. It's an opportunity to be creative and stand out, yet mostly there is safe and common approaches to website design, development and deployment.Too often the same stock imagery is used over and over again.

There remains a significant competitive edge for financial firms that want to reach out and position themselves. The time to change has never been better.

About Kirk Lowe
Kirk Lowe is the founder and Chief Branding Tactician at TactiBrand, a tactical branding and engagement firm. Kirk challenges financial firms and advisors to consider the application of their brand and how to tactically achieve results. His weekly blog posts on KirkLowe.com share wisdom about financial services marketing and brand building tactics.

Kirk tells his story without compromise to financial professionals, executives and CEOs who want to listen.

Visit http://www.TactiBrand.com for more information about what Kirk and the TactiBrand team can do.

For more information on this press release visit: http://www.releasewire.com/press-releases/release-3.htm

The following is by Dr. H. William Wolfson, DC, FICC, MS, MPAS.

Commack, NY -- (SBWIRE) -- 05/06/2014 -- Patients visit a doctor for many reasons, but there are individuals who attempt to treat themselves before seeking professional assistance. For instance, pain attributed to musculoskeletal conditions is the second most common reason patients visit a doctor; however, patients may decide to access online information and obtain free advice with self-help and treatment options. The plethora of recommendations may appear overwhelming, yet some may find help by attempting the posted suggestions—i.e., over-the-counter analgesics, ice, heat, rest, or hope their pain subsides.

Ultimately, patients who attempt self-care without achieving anticipated pain alleviation or positive results become concerned and stressed. They quickly realize their condition may warrant a consultation with a knowledgeable professional.

Investing becomes possible
Physicians who manage efficient practices realize, as their clinic becomes more profitable, the opportunity and ability to save and invest each month is an important reality.

Unfortunately, similar to a patient who attempts self-directed care, a physician who attempts to self-direct his or her own financial planning often discovers the inordinate amount of time necessary to research the myriad of financial products and learn about the litany of possible opportunities and how best to invest. Inquiries quickly turn into an avalanche of emails from research sites and offers for financial help. Similar to a patient, the physician quickly becomes disenfranchised and overwhelmed by the amount of information which exists and more importantly not understanding what it all means. Although highly educated and motivated to save and invest, the physician soon realizes the information may transcend his or her level of expertise and financial understanding.

The necessity of consulting with a professional who is knowledgeable of the intricacies and available information of health or financial matters should never be underestimated. Consumers—patients or investors—have access to an infinite amount of research materials, pundit opinions, and advertisements touting cure alls or potential financial windfalls without any appearance of negative consequences.

Patients seek your help
Patients have good intentions when attempting to help themselves with simple, uncomplicated health matters. It is conceivable that instituting some lifestyle changes and progressive strengthening exercises may help to alleviate symptoms, but is it getting to the core underlying cause of their condition?

The downside exists that if self-care fails to help, has valuable time been lost? Ultimately, who does a patient select to consult for their condition?

The professional selected should have the patient's interest in the forefront of all decisions made and is a fiduciary taking his or her oath to uphold its meaning. As a fiduciary, the physician has a duty to look out for the interests of the patient, even if they conflict with the physician's own interests. In other words, doctor do no harm!

The patient decides to visit a physician and, after filling out the requisite office intake forms, the doctor performs a consultation and examination. Recommendations are given to the patient and a course of treatment is initiated. A follow-up examination is done within a certain time frame and compared to the initial findings-both subjectively and objectively. As care continues, communication remains open and transparent and additional recommendations are made as the doctor-patient relationship moves forward.

The needs of the patient are met and the doctor fulfills his or her fiduciary responsibility.

Physicians who do not treat themselves

The physician after becoming disillusioned, disenfranchised and disgusted with the inordinate amount of financial rhetoric decides to contact a Certified Financial Planner (CFP) l. Part of the physician's research clearly indicated to be watchful for fiduciary vs. suitability standards, as they are quite different. According to "Investors Confused About Fiduciary/Suitability Difference" from the Journal of Financial Planning, 85% of investors who use an investment advisor either have not heard of or don't understand the difference between a fiduciary standard CFP and a suitability standard.

CFPs are fiduciaries and held to a very high compliance standard. Contrasting CFPs are brokers and the representatives or agents who work for them. Their responsibility to act on behalf of a client is limited to the suitability standard.

Similar to a patient filling out the requisite office forms to gather information, most CFPs use this information to develop an Investment Policy Statement (IPS). The IPS becomes the roadmap with which the advisor and client use as the asset portfolio is established and monitored.

Akin to the patient follow-up examination and an updated report, the client should receive a quarterly statement clearly illustrating the return of investment as compared to the benchmark of his or her asset class holdings and the overall portfolio return less any agreed to fees. In addition, monthly statements are sent to the client from an independent third-party fiduciary (i.e., Charles Schwab or Fidelity) clearly delineating the client's financial assets. The advisor does not, at any time, hold the client's assets; instead, he or she acts in a fiduciary manner to carry out the instructions of the client as agreed to in the IPS. This is an example of full transparency and fiduciary responsibility.

CFP advisors place the needs of the client before themselves and selling a product, which at face value appears to be suitable for the client. Piecemeal financial planning, as might be performed by a broker, representative or agent, may appear prudent at the time of client purchase, but may fall short of the client's financial expectations and needs.

The financial goals discussed and stipulated in the IPS and ongoing dialogue with the advisor, allows the full picture of what the client needs to reach his or her goals, as opposed to the piecemeal haphazard approach to financial investing. After the initial consultation (examination), implementation and follow through is maintained and monitored when working closely with a CFP.

Smart decisions yield successful results

Successful planning involves the ability to first crawl, then walk, run, and stay in the marathon to reach your expected goals. It takes client fortitude and discipline to stay the course in both up and down markets. It makes good sense to work with a CFP who has the depth of knowledge necessary to understand the overall scheme of financial products and how market changes can potentially change financial returns or require a direction shift to minimize risk and maximize asset returns.

The patient, by selecting a qualified and knowledgeable physician, safeguards his or her healthcare needs were put first. Accordingly, the physician should be afforded the same opportunity by working with a fiduciary advisor to ensure his or her portfolio and needs are carefully monitored and placed first.

There are no guarantees in life, health, or finances, but minimizing the risks by working with a fiduciary—both in health or financial services—allows an investor to remain confident his or her interests will be served first and protected.

H. William Wolfson, DC, FICC, MS, MPAS, earned his Doctor of Chiropractic and retired after 27 years of active practice. After passing the rigorous Certified Financial Planner examination, Wolfson continued his financial planning education and obtained his Masters of Science Personal Financial Planning from The College for Financial Planning. Subsequently, the college awarded him a Master Planner Advanced Studies certification.

While in and after private practice, Wolfson remains active in volunteering his time to the New York State Chiropractic Association, as a board member and past chapter president of Suffolk County, NY. In addition, he serves as the New York Delegate to the American Chiropractic Association (ACA), as well as participating on assorted important committees. For his volunteer efforts he was honored and inducted as a Fellow of the International Chiropractic College and awarded the prestigious 2011 ACA Delegate of the Year Award. He is a member of the Florida Chiropractic Association and presented at their Business Boot Camp. Dr. Wolfson is a member of the Financial Planning Association and volunteers on assorted committees in the Long Island, NY, chapter. Wolfson may be contacted at drhwwolfson@gmail.com.

For more information on this press release visit: http://www.releasewire.com/press-releases/release-3.htm

She argues that America is unique in its willingness to let people and companies fail, but also in its determination to let them pick up after the fall.

Washington, DC -- (ReleaseWire) -- 04/24/2014 -- Nationally Syndicated Financial Myth Busting Radio Show with Host Dawn Bennett, CEO of Bennett Group Financial Services, LLC, on April 13, 2014, interviewed Megan McArdle, author of the new book, "The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well is the Key to Success."

The show airs live on www.WMAL.com each Sunday at 11 am EDT. It now has over a year's worth of achieved interviews for listeners free on-demand at http://www.financialmythbusting.com.

Dawn discusses educational topics and events in the financial news, along with her thoughts on the economy, financial markets, investments, and more with her live guests, who have included Rock Legend Ted Nugent, as well as Steve Forbes and Grover Norquist. Listeners can call 855-884-DAWN as well as take podcasts on the road and forums for interaction. The show is a great complement to Dawn's monthly investing seminars that take place at Tysons Corner in McLean, VA, where she discusses investing.

Megan McArdle is a Washington-based writer and columnist for Bloomberg, where she covers economics, business, and public policy. Her work has also appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and Time magazine. McArdle has a new book titled, "The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well is the Key to Success," where she argues that America is unique in its willingness to let people and companies fail, but also in its determination to let them pick up after the fall. Now, failure, Megan believes, is how business and people learn as long as you learn to harness the power of failure.

Here is the interview:

Q: We seem to live in a country where everything is shaped by a celebratory culture in which every child plays in a soccer game, win or lose, they get a trophy, or a man's first campaign speech makes him qualified to get elected to president twice. I'm sorry to be a cynic, but we don't seem to be celebrating the benefits of failure in the U.S. We just seem to be rewarding inadequacy, even when it comes to economic terms, subsidizing failure. Do you see that?

A: "I think that we have a country where the descendants of people who saw that things weren't working out at home picked up and they crossed an ocean. If things weren't working out there, they picked up and crossed a prairie, and we've historically been very good at first letting things fail. We're also really good after people or companies fail, at helping them pick themselves up again.

"My great observation of life is human beings obviously respond positively to praise. They enjoy hearing that they're talented and smart and so on, but after praising anybody who really shouldn't be earning it, then they end up, when difficulty shows up, they almost collapse. They're so demoralized by their failure, this is my observation, they'd rather cheat or not admit it than risk failing again. So, I'm wondering why bother learning or working hard when there are never any obstacles to begin with?

"This is absolutely a problem. It was observed noticed that people who were successful tend to have high self-esteem, and they confused that with cause with and effect. 'Oh, well, other people would be more successful if they had high self-esteem,' but, the successful people had high self-esteem because they had done something that made them successful. When you praise people for accomplishing things that aren't really accomplishments then they don't learn to connect cause with effect. They don't learn to say, 'Okay, well if I do this, if I work this hard, I can get this.' Instead we praise them often, right? 'Oh, you're so smart. You're so pretty.' We're praising them for qualities they don't actually control.

"So, it's actually really dangerous, because then in their future lives when they face challenges and setbacks, they're not prepared. Instead of having learned, through the process of earning praise, having learned to achieve and to overcome setbacks, they just assume, 'Well, I don't know what actually gets me praise here, so I'm paralyzed and I'm going to give up.'

Q: I think our political culture too is just falling into this trap. Obamacare is not working, it's not a success, but the White House thinks its job is to spin this program into some type of decorated victory. You would think at this stage that they should be fighting for the U.S. government to be free to tell us that it isn't working so that they can correct the problem and move on. It's like Obama knows this is a mistake, but he's just afraid to own up to it.

A: "There are three key steps to dealing successfully with failure. First of all, to prepare for it, to understand that in order to succeed, you have to take risks and then, unlike in the movies, failure is an option.

"Second of all, then, to recognize that you failed, and third of all, to move on. That second step, so many people say, 'Well, obviously,' but people don't want to recognize failure. You'd be astonished at how often people simply fail to recognize what has gone wrong, that anything has gone wrong, and this goes for everyday.

"It's everything from people on plane crashes to people in failing businesses, yes, there's a huge psychological barrier to admitting that you have actually made a mistake, right? Because failure hurts, and it has to in order to make us stop, right? If it didn't hurt, we would just keep doing this stupid thing.

Q: So, is President Obama afraid of pain, or is he just being coy for political reasons, or is it his self-reflection, really just self-delusion?

A: "Well Obamacare is President Obama's signature legacy, right? That is what he is going to be remembered for, and so, obviously, he is incredibly invested in having it stay. So part of it is simply the psychological thing that we all have of not wanting to admit that something's gone wrong, but there's also this in politics, insistence can often be reality. If he simply keeps proclaiming that it's working, then maybe everyone else will have to believe it.

"So, the attempt to avoid the psychological pain of recognizing that something you really wanted to do hasn't worked leads people to shelter themselves by pretending that the failure hasn't happened and this is incredibly dangerous. That's really how GM got itself into its trouble, how people in failing relationships often waste extra years. People double down instead. When someone is confronted with a really bad loss, that's when they are most likely to invest more, denying the failure and trying to recover that loss even though that's the most dangerous thing they can do.

Q: Let's move from Obamacare to banks. One of the most notable failures of late is the collapse of several big banks, and the government deemed most of them too big to fail. What has your research told you about this episode? Would our economy have benefited from letting these banks declare bankruptcy and start over, or was Washington, DC right and they had to be bailed out?

A: "In terms of the bank bailouts, in my opinion, they had to be bailed out, in part because we didn't have good procedures for putting these banks into bankruptcy, and that goes back to step 1, you have to understand that failure is an option, and you have to prepare for it. The problem was that for years as a financial journalist I was reporting on something called The Great Moderation which was this idea that regulators had gotten so good at their job that we basically just couldn't have financial crises anymore, and that was a kind of crazy idea that was really common. That meant that when the crisis hit, and this is what happens if you assume that it can't happen, when the crisis hit, we just weren't in any way prepared for the fallout, so we had to take desperate measures, which in this case included bailouts, simply because no one had prepared the markets or the legal system.

Q: The too big to fail were bailed out, but are they now prepared? The way I see it, they aren't. We've got issues with mortgages and so many issues. The only thing that we've done is continue to supply liquidity to the system, but it doesn't seem like we've made any policy changes to prepare us for the next great crisis?

A: "Since then we have not, in many ways, prepared the way I would like. We've done some good things, for example, banks are now holding more capital, and, as any financial specialist will tell you, the best way to prepare for a financial setback is just to have more reserves. That's all to the good, but then we spend a lot of time attaching things that weren't really all that related. For example, we attached a rule that regulated the interchange fees that credit card processors can charge merchants. It's that 1 to 2 percent fee that they take out of the top of any transaction they do.

"Dick Durbin from Illinois thought that was too high, and so they attached a bill to that. Completely unclear what benefit this was supposed to provide, but nonetheless they went ahead and did it, rather than making the banks safe, it turned into this omnibus, 'hey, everything that I've ever thought about the financial system, let's load it in,' which meant that we didn't spend enough time on the parts that were really necessary, which is how do we make sure the next time a bank fails, instead of having to give them a $1 trillion worth of bailouts, we have an orderly resolution system in process, the way that the bankruptcy code has an orderly resolution for companies that can't pay their bills.

Q: What about when it comes to companies?

A: "So bankruptcy code is extremely good at helping companies reorganize, at helping people get back on their feet. But in the last 20, 30, 40 years, we've gotten to this place where we're increasingly reluctant to say, 'You know, things go wrong sometimes.'

"So, a similar story occurred in Detroit, where two of the three major American automakers effectively collapsed in the last year of the Bush administration. Now one company was saved and is now owned by Fiat, an Italian automaker. I'm wondering if we could rewind the clock and play this thing again, is there a chance Americans could still buy an American-made Jeep?

"They should've lined that up well in advance, but Rick Wagoner, who has been the CEO, simply refused. There's an argument that can be made that they waited too long and because the financial crisis had totally frozen up credit, they needed such a big bailout -- about $50 billion worth of capital to do the transition -- more than any bank was willing to lend at that point, that maybe the government needed to provide financing.

"That's very different from what the government did. Bankruptcy courts are very good at resolving industrial concerns and have a lot of experience at it. The government could've made a tidy little bit of money doing what banks do, stepping in, because they had capital, and just lending a normal debtor-in-possession financing. Instead, they used the money to buy part of GM, to start re-ordering the lines of the creditors so that the union health benefits fund got more than a lot of the other creditors. Taking it from other creditors who ordinarily would've gotten more money. I think that absolutely you can make an argument that maybe we needed to do the financing. We did not need to step in and orchestrate this crazy, elaborate process of deciding how GM would be run for the next five years, which is what we ended up doing. It ended up costing the U.S. a lot of money.

Q: There's a lot of discussion that the U.S. dollar is being debased and will eventually just go away. That would be a massive bankruptcy for the United States. Do you think that we're prepared for anything like that?

A: "I think that the bigger issue is the dollar is like a canary in a coal mine. When it goes down, it's a symptom of something else that's happening and not always something bad that's happening. For example, China spends a lot of money trying to make our currency expensive relative to theirs, because then it's basically an export subsidy for their exports.

"So if the dollar went up a little bit because China wasn't buying so many dollars, that might actually be good. It would even out our exports, save some American jobs, and correct a lot of the crazy foreign reserve imbalances that you're seeing build up around the world. On the other hand, the dollar is a symptom that we're running 5 percent budget deficits every year. We can't get a political consensus on how to actually cut and restructure our way into fiscal solvency. People have stopped believing that the U.S. is going to repay those debts, or stopped believing that American companies are going be making good products and that America's a good place to invest. That is going to be catastrophic, and we are absolutely not prepared for that to happen.

Q: Don't you think they aren't believing it? China used to be the No. 1 holder of U.S. Treasury debt, then was Japan. Now, they're No. 4, 5 on the list. Today it's the American taxpayer who's the No. 1 holder of U.S. Treasury debt. Isn't that already a sign or a symbol that they are losing faith that we might get paid or they might get paid back in funny money?

A: "The Fed has been taking extraordinary interventions over the last few years, trying to keep employment up and trying to keep the country from sliding back into recession. It can be argued whether what they've been doing is good or bad, but ultimately, the bigger risk to the American taxpayer from that is not that they're so much that they're holding their own debt so to speak. That would actually be fairly not risky, right? We can decide what we want to repay ourselves. The big risk is that there's inflation or some sort of financial instability that comes out of that."

Bennett Group Financial Services LLC, based in Washington, D.C., is a comprehensive financial services firm committed to providing opportunities to clients' as they seek long-term financial success. Its customized programs are designed with the potential to help grow, lower overall risk and conserve client assets by delivering a high level of personalized service and skill. For more information, call 866-286-2268 or visit www.bennettgroupfinancial.com.

Securities offered through Western International Securities Inc. (WIS), member FINRA/SIPC. BGFS and WIS are separate and unaffiliated entities.

About Dawn Bennett
Dawn Bennett is CEO and Founder of Bennett Group Financial Services. She hosts a national radio program on www.WMAL.com called Financial Myth Busting http://www.financialmythbusting.com. She can be reached on Twitter @DawnBennettFMB or on Facebook Financial Myth Busting with Dawn Bennett or dbennett@bennettgroupfinancial.com

For more information on this press release visit: http://www.releasewire.com/press-releases/release-3.htm

Washington, DC -- (ReleaseWire) -- 04/23/2014 -- We actually got a call last week from a really bright analyst saying, "You know, we are entering into something called a 'Grand Cardinal Cross,' and this is where four planets, Pluto, Uranus, Jupiter, and Mars oppose one another in the shape of a cross." Apparently it's this tension that's happening up in space that's actually creating tremendous instability in our stock markets according to him. Of course we don't believe this, says Dawn Bennett, CEO of Bennett Group Financial Services, but the height of denial and stupidity is reached when investors and stock analysts are talking about being cosmically prudent, "because Saturn is 16 degrees to Scorpio." Really?!

Look, horoscope investing and being cosmically prudent aside, no one in the end is going to ring the bell at the top of the market for investors and then ask them to very kindly and politely please exit the building in an orderly fashion. When this pretend recovery and market rise ends, few actually will be ready and even fewer will be able to withstand the losses. It certainly feels like we're living in a make-believe, pretend economy, and as an investor, it's important to recognize the situation honestly, because, as of now, no reading of the economic tea leaves suggests a surge in economic growth is coming.

Even a highly critical analysis of the data makes most question whether there has even been a recovery at all. We're heading into earnings season, and the gap between current first quarter reality and forward-looking, unicorn-fueled expectations for continued growth has reached a new peak of fairytale faith and it is widening.

Not a day passes without some talking head opining on corporate profit growth. This is keeping the market afloat because with every reiteration, these so-called market geniuses confirm that they are clueless about how profits are created in the U.S. We're not talking about accounting gimmicks and the bottom-line fudgery that are financials; We're speaking to actual earnings, and when you strip away all the one-time, non-recurring boosts, things are way worse than reported.

According to a report last week from Societe Generale, the French multinational banking and financial services company, "U.S. profits have begun to decline on MSCI trailing basis, one of the key measures we monitor." MSCI is the Morgan Stanley Capital International index which is the primary benchmark index for global equity markets. It continued, "We have long believed that the profit cycle is probably the most important leading indicator for the economic cycle, as profits drive the highly volatile business investment component of GDP. The consensus believes that the U.S. has been on a long economic recovery, but we believe it's already quite advanced and vulnerable to events in Asia and the United States. Falling U.S. MSCI profits are an extremely important straw in the wind that investors will ignore at their own peril."

What they're saying is MSCI profits are starting to fall. Then, it's more than just equity strategists who should be getting worried, because the growth in profits is closely associated with the business investment cycle. People will get used to almost anything if it goes on for long enough, and the process doesn't take long for the common investor to miss signs they don't experience directly. Very much like the boiling frog metaphor applied to investors.

So, know this in advance: U.S. companies will have to increase profit margins to all-time record highs in order for analysts' estimates to be met, which is why we view the US markets with continued skepticism. At the end of the day, valuations and economic conditions are extremely inconsistent even though the markets are rising, and they can remain that way for a while, but not forever.

Last week alone should be enough warning to move out of the way; initial jobless claims plunged to the lowest levels since 2006; most of the growth stocks were slammed last week, and leading pounding were momentum stocks and biotechs, which are the largest holdings in most investors' stock portfolio.

The third warning out there is Japanese stocks which are in free-fall, down about 15 percent from their highs, and trading at six-month lows and that is only the tip of the Asian iceberg …what about China continuing to report dismal economic data?

Most U.S. investors believe we have reached escape velocity, but this market carries a far higher risk than any star chart or cosmic reading supposes, so investors need to be prepared and stay away from the ridiculous nature of stock market horoscopes. Investors need to trust savings and retirement accounts with experts, not with tarot card readers.

Securities offered through Western International Securities, Inc. Member FINRA & SIPC. Bennett Group Financial and Western International Securities, Inc. are separate & unaffiliated companies.

All market data references are sourced to Bloomberg terminal database.

Bennett Group Financial Services LLC, based in Washington, D.C., is a comprehensive financial services firm committed to providing opportunities to clients' as they seek long-term financial success. Its customized programs are designed with the potential to help grow, lower overall risk and conserve client assets by delivering a high level of personalized service and skill. For more information, call 866-286-2268 or visit www.bennettgroupfinancial.com.

About Dawn Bennett
Dawn Bennett is CEO and Founder of Bennett Group Financial Services. She hosts a national radio program on www.WMAL.com called Financial Myth Busting http://www.financialmythbusting.com. She can be reached on Twitter @DawnBennettFMB or on Facebook Financial Myth Busting with Dawn Bennett or dbennett@bennettgroupfinancial.com

For more information on this press release visit: http://www.releasewire.com/press-releases/release-3.htm

Investors wonder how it is possible that with all the recent economic data misses, the U.S. stock market indices actually rose to all-time highs.

Washington, DC -- (ReleaseWire) -- 04/21/2014 -- The week of March 31, 2014 was another head-scratcher for investors who wonder how it is possible that with all the week's economic data misses, the U.S. stock market indices actually rose to all-time highs says Dawn Bennett, CEO of Bennett Group Financial Services.

The first red flag was the Chicago Purchasing Managers' Index (PMI) which missed expectations by the most in a year and tumbled to its lowest level since August. The Chicago PMI is an economic indicator taken from monthly surveys at private sector companies, which allows it to be an index to first know when trading conditions and company performance has changed for better or worse. This business barometer has been falling since October and the index has collapsed to 50 percent from 59.3 percent, because prices paid have dropped and new orders to the private sector have tumbled to the lowest levels since August of 2013.

The second red flag was the reporting of the February 2014 trade deficit, which indicated a significant widening deficit which should impact the net export of U.S. GDP directly and negatively, potentially knocking off 1 percent from the headline GDP growth rate. This is the last report before the GDP estimates come out on April 30, 2014.

The third economic red flag that occurred this week was the Baltic Dry Index, which is a shipping index. It provides an idea of the price of moving major raw materials by sea, and is seen as an efficient economic indicator of future economic growth and production. The Baltic Dry Index is down 25 percent in the last two weeks, back near post-crisis lows, and just suffered the worst start to a year in over a decade.

The final red flag this week was the market receiving a big gift from the Federal Reserve with a record window dressing operation in the form of some $242 billion in reverse repo Treasuries that were provided to dealer banks in order to make their books look more attractive for quarter end. The banks turned around and dumped it into risky assets, the Dow and the S&P 500. This explains their new highs and the week's buying deluge.

However, all that easy money for the month of April has now been used up. This was telling on Friday, the only day of the week that the Fed didn't inject any cash into the market, the NASDAQ crashed the most since 2011. When the Fed's collateral window dressing is on, we have almost a fantastical market, and when the collateral window dressing is off, it's a nightmare. Since the Fed has announced their plans for continued reduction of Treasury and mortgage purchases, we should expect more down days.

Securities offered through Western International Securities, Inc. Member FINRA & SIPC. Bennett Group Financial and Western International Securities, Inc. are separate & unaffiliated companies.

All market data references are sourced to Bloomberg terminal database.

For more information on this press release visit: http://www.releasewire.com/press-releases/release-3.htm

He was an advisor on capital markets to the director of National Intelligence in the office of the U.S. Secretary of Defense, where he took part in the secret war games sponsored by the Pentagon. The game's goal was to explore the potential outcomes and effects of a global financial war.

Washington, DC -- (ReleaseWire) -- 04/17/2014 -- Nationally Syndicated Financial Myth Busting Radio Show with Host Dawn Bennett, CEO of Bennett Group Financial Services, LLC, on April 6, 2014, interviewed Jim Rickards, author of "The Death of Money: The Coming Collapse of the International Monetary System."

The show airs live on www.WMAL.com each Sunday at 11 am EDT. It now has over a year's worth of achieved interviews for listeners free on-demand at http://www.financialmythbusting.com.

Dawn discusses educational topics and events in the financial news, along with her thoughts on the economy, financial markets, investments, and more with her live guests, who have included Rock Legend Ted Nugent, as well as Steve Forbes and Grover Norquist. Listeners can call 855-884-DAWN as well as take podcasts on the road and forums for interaction. The show is a great complement to Dawn's monthly investing seminars that take place at Tysons Corner in McLean, VA, where she discusses investing.

When we first spoke with Jim Rickards, we learned that in 2009, he was an advisor on capital markets to the director of National Intelligence in the office of the U.S. Secretary of Defense, where he took part in the secret war games sponsored by the Pentagon. The game's goal was to explore the potential outcomes and effects of a global financial war, said Ms. Bennett.

A few years later, Mr. Rickards published his first national best seller, "Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crisis." As we found out l ast time when we spoke with him, there's a very dangerous global financial crisis brewing out there and is inevitable, she said.

Mr. Rickards has just published the sequel to "Currency Wars," entitled "The Death of Money: The Coming Collapse of the International Monetary System."

In his book, "The Death of Money," he points to a number of developments that are in favor of the ongoing breakdown of the confidence in the U.S. dollar as the world's reserve currency. These developments not only happened in the U.S., but other countries, such as Russia, China, and Japan.

Here are some of Mr. Rickards thoughts:

"In the war game, we could only use financial weapons. We put forward a scenario where Russia and China combine their gold reserves, issue a new currency backed by gold, and most importantly they say hereafter any Russian oil or gas exports and any Chinese manufactured goods could only be paid for in this new currency, and if you wanted some, you either had to earn it or deposit gold and get the currency. It was a way of turning their backs on the dollar. Now, literally, that was a stretch that was very forward-leaning at the time, but, of course, the whole purpose of a war game is to think outside the box and think of new threats and scenarios. We got a certain amount of ridicule at the time, but in the last five years, Russia has increased its gold reserves 70 percent.

"China has increased its gold reserves several hundred percent. No one knows the exact number, because they're not transparent about it. So, they haven't actually eliminated or stopped using the dollar, but they're getting closer to that point. They're acting exactly the way we expected they might. To see how this is playing out in the real world, you have this situation in Crimea. Of course, Crimea is now part of Russia. As they have taken it over.

"No one thinks we should have a military response, but we immediately went to economic sanctions, which is a form of financial warfare, exactly what we were advising the Pentagon, and Russia has threatened to escalate. We have sort of token sanctions that won't do very much, but if we have more meaningful sanctions, the Russians would come back, and they could dump their holdings of U.S. Treasury bills, cause the U.S. interest rates to go up, sink our stock market, sink our housing market. They could unleash their hackers to close the New York Stock Exchange. There's a lot they could do, so it is a very dangerous wo rld, and it's playing out not in military space, but in financial warfare space.

"The U.S. has been at a full-scale financial war with Iran since 2011. We haven't used military forces against Iran, but we kicked them out of the dollar payment system. Then we got our allies, and we kicked them out of the international payment system, which is based in Belgium. They were in a situation where they could sell oil, but they couldn't get paid for it, at least not in any currency that you would want, like dollars or euros or yen. This caused a run on the Iranian banks. People took their money out, tried to buy dollars on the black market so they could pay smugglers to bring in goods. Iran had to raise interest rates to stop the run on the banks, so we caused sky-high interest rates, hyperinflation, collapse in currency, and all kinds of economic turmoil in Iran.

"Now, what happened last December, President Obama lifted a lot of these sanctions, and don't think that Putin wasn't watching, 'cause he could see that the U.S. wasn't willing to really push it as far as we could. I'm sure he took some comfort from that, but what we did when we started these negotiations with Iran on their uranium enrichment program and their nuclear weapons program, we were, in effect, giving them a green light. They still have their plutonium producing reactors and still have their centrifuges. They're still enriching uranium, but we're in talks with the United States. This was taken by Saudi Arabia as a stab in the back, cause the whole of the petrodollar deal is that we agreed to protect the Kingdom, basically, protect the national security of Saudi Arabia, and they agreed, operating through OPEC, that oil could only be priced in dollars.

"Well everyone needs oil, so if oil is priced in dollars, that means you need dollars. That was a key support under the dollar. Well, now Saudi Arabia is saying, 'Look, if you're saying Iran is the regional power, and you're cozying up and having detente with Iran, then that's a stab in the back to our national security, so why should we support the dollar?' So, you combine all these things, China acquiring gold, Russia acquiring gold, the ruble is now the official currency of Crimea, Saudi Arabia feeling betrayed, no one of them is dispositive, but you put them all together, you can see one-by-one the legs are being ripped out from under the platform that's holding up the dollar.

"Russia's got a lot of natural gas. China needs a lot of natural gas. They're building pipelines and other transportation mechanisms through central Asia. If they get that trade going, and Russia says, 'Look, we'll take the yuan or the renminbi in payment," and China says, 'We'll take rubles,' and then they can build up those currency balances. Remember they're two members of the BRICS: Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. Russia and China are the two biggest members of the BRICS. They're working on a multilateral bank that would replace the IMF, at least for their purposes. All these things are threats to the dollar. My concern is that the people in charge of the dollar, at the Federal Reserve and the Treasury, take it for granted. They take confidence for granted. Confidence is fragile. It can be lost very easily. It's very hard to regain and it's almost as if they're ignoring these world developments, but investors, obviously, should not.

"What does the collapse of the dollar mean? One thing it means is inflation, because if people start dumping dollars and our interest rates have to go up, obviously, that will sink our stock and housing markets. The Fed has printed so much money that if people don't want it, the circula tion of that money would increase, and that is highly inflationary. So, the people most at risk I'd say is people with savings in the bank, or having an insurance policy or annuity or retirement income, anybody with a kind of fixed income is most vulnerable. People need to protect themselves. I recommend putting 10 percent of investable assets in gold. If these things don't happen, you only have 10 percent, and gold goes sideways, so it's not really going cost very much, but if it does happen, and the dollar collapses because of inflation and loss of confidence, then gold will go up by multiples. That's an insurance policy against these bad outcomes.

"I don't think Janet Yellen is committed to tapering. She has tapered, chaired a couple of meetings where they've tapered. The next meeting is April 30, 2014. These are meetings of the Federal Open Market Committee where Janet Yellen is the chairwoman. They will taper another $10 billion April 30, 2014 and that's certainly expected, but they're tapering into weakness. The U.S. economy is fundamentally weak right now.

"Watch what h appens in June or July. My expectation is that she will pause the taper, but they won't increase asset purchases, but they'll stop decreasing asset purchases. Asset purchases are the way they print money. I think she'll go to pause, which means that they'll continue to print the amount they are, which is about $55 billion a month. It's down from $85 billion, but they'll continue at that level, and then I expect them to actually increase asset purchases again later in the year when all this weakness becomes apparent. She'll go back to easing, that's where her heart is. Remember, she is very model-based. She's a professor; an egghead, and she's not thinking about the dollar in international terms. She's just looking at her domestic models, and they tell her to print more money, and that's just another threat to the dollar. Well what's going to be the straw that actually breaks the Federal Reserve's back or Janet Yellen's back? There's got to be something out ther e, worldwide, it just is so apparent to so many people, but not to them. As far as the Fed's concerned, I honestly don't think Janet Yellen can spell gold. I mean she doesn't think about it. She wasn't trained to think about it. She's never had to discuss it. Her colleagues don't discuss it. They don't think about it in monetary terms. But people do, because they understand it's real money at the end of the day.

"The Fed has the wrong models. They use what are called equilibrium models. An equilibrium model says the economy is norma lly in equilibrium. If you disturb it, and obviously 2008 was more than a disturbance, it throws it out of whack, and then you have to apply policy and bring it back to equilibrium. That's how they think about the world. That's not how the world works. The world is actually a complex dynamic system, and that block of uranium that you've got, if you shave it certain way and bang it together, it causes a nuclear explosion and kills a million people. So, that's how complex systems work. It's the difference between a thermostat and a nuclear reactor. The Fed thinks they have a thermostat. If their house is too cool, they can dial it up. They think they've got a thermostat, but they're actually toying around with a nuclear reactor, and they're going to melt down the system."

About Bennett Group Financial Services LLC
Bennett Group Financial Services LLC, based in Washington, D.C., is a comprehensive financial services firm committed to providing opportunities to clients' as they seek long-term financial success. Its customized programs are designed with the potential to help grow, lower overall risk and conserve client assets by delivering a high level of personalized service and skill. For more information, call 866-286-2268 or visit http://www.bennettgroupfinancial.com.

Securities offered through Western International Securities Inc. (WIS), member FINRA/SIPC. BGFS and WIS are separate and unaffiliated entities.

About Dawn Bennett
Dawn Bennett is CEO and Founder of Bennett Group Financial Services. She hosts a national radio program on www.WMAL.com called Financial Myth Busting http://www.financialmythbusting.com. She can be reached on Twitter @DawnBennettFMB or on Facebook Financial Myth Busting with Dawn Bennett or dbennett@bennettgroupfinancial.com

For more information on this press release visit: http://www.releasewire.com/press-releases/release-3.htm

Washington, DC -- (ReleaseWire) -- 04/16/2014 -- For those that are actually loving the rise in this U.S. financial market, Warren Buffett has some pretty cheeky advice to share in his annual letter to the Berkshire Hathaway shareholders. He was remembering the late Barton Biggs, the first and foremost global investment strategist, when he opined on times like these in the marketplace; so, Buffett wanted to quote him: "A bull market is like sex. It feels best just before it ends." Now, as much as the thought of Warren Buffett and saying the word "sex" in the same sentence is weird and uncomfortable I have to say, Buffett with this comparison, actually has a point, says Dawn Bennett, Founder of Bennett Group Financial Services. She goes on to say the following:

The U.S. financial markets felt pretty good recently, didn't they? The S&P 500 index actually touched an intraday record recently. So, why be so antsy? Why would we want to talk about some warnings instead and not be willing to give into that feel-good moment we all had last week?

Well as most U.S. companies prepare to report first quarter results in a few weeks, approximately 108 have already warned the Street to brace themselves for worse than expected profits. This is versus just only 16 that have pointed to better surprises. Now, Thompson Reuters, the worldwide news coverage service and research house, reported that Wall Street had originally expected first quarter 2014 profits to grow by 6.5 percent year over year. But today, that growth has dropped down to 2.1 percent, which really isn't very sexy, is it? Nor is it sexy in the long run, for those investors thinking the rise we had this week will continue. Plus, what really will be unnerving to investor portfolios is how the U.S., which led the world in the largest amount of quantitative easing ever, will soon be leading the world into monetary tightening.

Recently the new Fed Chair, Janet Yellen, shocked the marketplace by projecting when, after the Fed ends its buying program, they will raise rates. She said that between the end of quantitative easing and the first rate hike, it just might be only six months. So, just like that, the countdown clock started. And just like that, things are going to be very un-sexy in investment portfolios if you own U.S. stocks and bonds that are dollar-denominated. What's worse is according to Stephanie Pomboy at MacroMavens, our one-time foreign financiers, China, Japan and Russia, have long since packed their bags, because they're afraid of the Fed's easy money program stopping.

Also they're afraid of rising interest rates because those are bad for stocks and bonds. Most of all, they are afraid of the faltering dollar. They used to provide us close to $1 trillion annually to fun d the federal budget deficit through Treasury purchases, and today they are only providing $15 billion annually.

Also, other foreign central banks have been net sellers of Treasuries to the tune of $78 billion. China and Japan have all but stopped their purchases, with Japan unloading about $100 billion in the past 12 months, and no, this isn't about Russia and Ukraine and Putin, or even Treasuries. This is about the U.S. dollar. They are so afraid to be paid back in funny money.

It's going to be the dollar that's going to be the value for our monetary sins, which will be a greater danger to the U.S. economy than anything Putin might ever pull off. So this is my first warning to all investment portfolios.

It has always been fascinating to me that as investors, we fail to pay attention to warning signs as long as we don't see any immediate and imminent danger. Yet, when the inevitable downside of anything occurs we refuse to accept responsibility for the consequences. This is why I want investors to really pay attention to these next few negative warning signs, because they are here for all to see.

The next warning sign that the markets are overbought is that the current valuation of the S&P 500 is lofty by almost any measure, both by the aggregate market as well as the med ian stock market. Furthermore, the adjusted price-earnings ratio, suggests that the S&P 500 is currently 30 percent overvalued in terms of operating earnings per share, and about 45% overvalued using reported earnings. Not good.

The third warning sign for investment portfolios is that there's an unusually high ratio of selling to buying by corporate senior managers. Today, corporate insiders are more bearish than they have been in almost 25 years, which isn't positive news for the stock market since these insiders, corporate officers and directors, know more about their companies' internal workings and future prospects than the rest of us. So investors might want to take some of their pessimism and size down U.S. stock and bond holdings. We've warned investors over and over again about an inflated U.S. stock market created by the Fed.

American investors need to pay attention to what's going on, because it's not going to be a "feel good" ending, which is why we are seeing the insiders sell. This is also why we're also seeing these foreign entities walk away from buying even U.S. Treasuries, which were supposed to be, at one time, the safest paper obligations in the world.

Securities offered through Western International Securities, Inc. Member FINRA & SIPC. Bennett Group Financial and Western Internationa l Securities, Inc. are separate & unaffiliated companies.

All market data references are sourced to Bloomberg terminal database.

For more information on this press release visit: http://www.releasewire.com/press-releases/release-3.htm

We believe China has reached its Bear Stearns moment and that the U.S. is about to relive the Lehman Brothers version

Washington, DC -- (ReleaseWire) -- 04/15/2014 -- We believe China has reached its Bear Stearns moment and that the U.S. is about to relive the Lehman Brothers version. Last month marked the six year anniversary (week of March 17, 2014) of the Bear Stearns collapse and with it came talk of a new world wide stock market bubble that is intensifying. There are three areas that make us question the price of most assets and wonder if they are on the high side of fair value. Extreme caution is now needed says Dawn Bennett, Founder of Bennett Group Financial Services. Here are her thoughts:

The first area of concern is that China's economy appears to be crashing. We predicted this about 8 months ago, but it is really star ting to show up now. Last month, March 3, 2014, China's trade balance experienced its biggest miss on record and the second largest deficit on record. Chinese exports plunged negative 18.1% year over year, which reverses an expectation of a positive 7.5% rise. This is a six standard deviation miss and that is huge when it comes to reading metrics. Even exports to the rest of the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India and China) were down over 20%. So we think it's fair to say even the contagion in the emerging market crisis is deepening and spreading. This is why we continue to point out that emerging markets are looking for an excuse to drop deep. This excuse is a really good one.

The second area of concern is that the U.S. for the third month in a row had factory orders miss expectations with a major downside revision to the December 2013 data point of negative 2%. This means it's fallen two months in a row. Even worse are rising inventories in 9 of the last 10 months, which is the highest level since the government started tracking this metric. Given the negative this could be for the U.S., we'd better hope that the pent up demand starts kicking in and U.S. consumers begin buying stuff again or our consumer driven economy will be in big trouble. Nearly 75% of the U.S. economy is consumer driven.

The third area of concern last month was that both China and the U.S. have credit excesses to work of f because today it is worse than before the 2008 crash. Both the U.S. and China have been printing money with no end in sight. In the last five years, the total assets on U.S. bank books have risen by $2.1 trillion. At the same time Chinese bank assets have blown up to an unprecedented $15.4 trillion . While the U.S. Federal Reserve was injecting $85 billion per month into U.S. banks for a total of $1 trillion in just the trailing twelve months ending September 30, Chinese bank assets grew by a mind-blowing $3.6 trillion. So we are asking if China has reached its Bear Stearns moment and is the U.S. about to relive the Lehman Brothers version?

The World Economic Forum is also asking this and came out last month, March 3, 2014, and wrote "fiscal crisis triggered by ballooning debt levels in both China and the U.S. pose the biggest threat to the global economy in 2014."

So will China and the U.S. mark Bear Stearns' less than joyous anniversary with another less than joyous negative economic event?

Securities offered through Western International Securities, Inc. Member FINRA & SIPC. Bennett Group Financial and Western International Securities, Inc. are separate & unaffiliated companies.

All market data references are sourced to Bloomberg terminal database.

For more information on this press release visit: http://www.releasewire.com/press-releases/release-3.htm

Watkins is one of today's most vocal champions of laissez-faire capitalism

Washington D.C. -- (ReleaseWire) -- 04/08/2014 -- Nationally Syndicated Financial Myth Busting Radio Show with Host Dawn Bennett, CEO of Bennett Group Financial Services, LLC, on March 23, 2014, interviewed Don Watkins, a fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute and co-author of the book, "Free Market Revolution: How Ayn Rand's Ideas Can End Big Government."

The show airs live on www.WMAL.com each Sunday at 11 am EDT. It now has over a year's worth of achieved interviews for listeners free on-demand at http://www.financialmythbusting.com.

Dawn discusses educational topics and events in the financial news, along with her thoughts on the economy, financial markets, investments, and more with her live guests, who have included Rock Legend Ted Nugent, as well as Steve Forbes and Grover Norquist. Listeners can call 855-884-DAWN as well as take podcasts on the road and forums for interaction. The show is a great complement to Dawn's monthly investing seminars that take place at Tysons Corner in McLean, VA, where she discusses investing.

Don Watkins is a fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute and co-author of the book, "Free Market Revolution: How Ayn Rand's Ideas Can End Big Government." Watkins is one of today's most vocal champions of laissez-faire capitalism. Mr. Watkins has been interviewed on hundreds of radio and TV programs, and is a regular speaker at conferences in university campuses including Stanford, Brown, the University of Virginia, and the University of Chicago. Now, recently, Don wrote and published an article about our individual rights as American citizens called, "End the Draft Campaign," in which he writes that millions of young Americans are being drafted into debt thanks to America's old age welfare programs like Social Security and Medicare.

Here are some thoughts from Mr. Don Watkins:

"Just in the way that the military draft treated young people as property of the state and sent them into wars regardless of their desires, regardless of their own pursuit of happiness, so, thanks mainly to Social Security and Medicare, the future of today's Millennials and then our children is really being treated as the property of the state. We're being drafted into debt in order to provide people with retirement and medical benefits. And let me just give you one number to keep in mind, that's the payroll tax today is about 15.3 percent just for Social Security and Medicare Part A. Now, for the average millennial worker, that's more than the equivalent of paying for the monthly fee on a new car for somebody else.

"The way that we're headed, in few decades, to the point where they're going to have to pay for a brand new car each year for the elderly. Now, think of what you have to set aside in your life to buy your own car. We can't afford it in part because of these programs that are forcing us to set aside our hopes and dreams. We aren't allowed to spend the money we earned to send our child to school, to buy a car, to plan for our old age. We are being forced to serve the goals and needs of other Americans. That's inconsistent with the pursuit of happiness.

"Think about the essence of what your freedom is for. Your freedom is to build a life for yourself. To go out there, find a career you love, earn money, and then use that to serve your hopes and dreams. And whenever the government then takes your money and says, 'No, we're going use it for other purposes. We're going give it to other people for their purposes,' what that really translates into is, for instance, maybe someone can't live in a low-crime neighborhood, they have to live in a high-crime neighborhood.

"Maybe someone can't pay off student loans, which is what a lot of the kids we see when speaking at universities are struggling with. Well, that is completely unfair, and the fact is that if the government didn't have these programs, the vast majority of Americans are responsible, financially successful, and if the government wasn't taking so much of their money, they would be able to support themselves, and indeed, they'd be able to support themselves far better than today. Social Security, for all that it takes from us, for the average person, it only gives them about $1,000 a month, whereas if they were free to keep their own money and prepare for old age, there's no reason they couldn't get multiples of that.

"If the government had to do accounting the same way that businesses do, the shortfall we're talking about is not $12 trillion, which is about the debt today. Economists put the number at $205 trillion. That's the present value calculation. So, that means that we would have to take $205 trillion today and invest it in order to pay that number. Now, that's more money than exists on the earth. What it means in practice is that if we were to really pay that off by raising taxes, every federal tax would have to increase by upwards of 50 percent. That would just eviscerate our standard of living. It would really bring the economy to a halt. So, something has to change because the burden on young people's shoulders if you look at lifetime taxes versus benefits, the Baby Boomers today are on track to receive more than $300,000 of benefits than they ever will pay in taxes.

"The Millennials will do a little worse. They will have to be taxed $10,000 to $20,000 more than they ever receive in benefits, but their child's generation, what's going to happen to them is complete corruption. We're talking $400,000 more in taxes than they'll ever receive in benefits. Now, obviously, that's not really going to happen because that would just bankrupt people and we would never be able to do it.

"What it illustrates is the scale of our problem and the immorality of these programs that we would put such burdens on our children and grandchildren. Think of the outrage when we think when we hear about a Hollywood family whose child stars in movies, makes millions of dollars, and then by the time the child is 18, the parents spend it all on their own consumption.

"Well, we're doing something way worse to a whole generation of Americans, and we're doing it in the name of programs that are supposed to be these great moral achievements. And indeed, you have people like Senator Elizabeth Warren, talking about expanding Social Security and giving more benefits to seniors and taking more money from our children, which is just atrocious.

"For a 52 year old, government debt is actually going to make Medicare and Social Security promises almost meaningless for that generation because both are expected to run out of money within the next 20 years. So what is Senator Warren talking about? It's a real travesty. They are debt deniers because they're minimizing a real problem and keeping us from preparing for it, because the fact is every day you wait, the harder it is to deal with these issues.

"So, let's say that you were just going to try to do it the way that the liberals want to do it and raise taxes in order to pay these bills. First of all, and in the end, you can't do that. The level of taxation you would have to increase it today is something like 30 percent on all federal taxes. If we wait 20 years, we're talking 50 percent.

"We need to act now, but I think the question is what direction should we go? These programs are not bad just because they've suddenly gotten too expensive. They give people benefits that they didn't earn through savings and investment. Now, if you don't think that's going to end up in runaway costs, then you've never put Halloween candy on your front door with a sign that says 'please take one.'

"If people can vote themselves benefits that they don't have to pay for, you're going to get these out of control costs. But the deeper issue is this. All these programs are based on the idea that rather than being free to earn money and use it to promote your life as you judge best, the government is going to take away the individual's control of his life. It's going to force him into these programs like Social Security and Medicare, and it's, in effect, like we're all going to sit around a big tribal pot. We throw everything we earn in, and then hopefully, we'll get some scraps out of it. Right?

"But that's not the American way. The American way was you're free to achieve as much as your ambition and ability will make possible. What's crazy is this idea that even a person benefits from being in Social Security, if the government gives him more in the end than it took. Even that is not true, because the fact is that we're going to have different values and needs. Someone may have the goal to basically spend a decade or two in retirement playing golf. I'm a writer, and my goal is to basically do that until I can't do it anymore. And so, we have very different retirement needs. And if we were left free, I would save a different amount and use the money to promote different sorts of goals, say, putting my child into school, saving more modestly for old age, and he might put a lot more in his 401(k).

"All of that choice is taken away from us by the welfare state because a huge chunk of someone's income is just going to be poured into the laps of retirees, and then the government just gives a half-promise that says, 'Hey, maybe one day you'll be able to tax your children and grandchildren to support yourself.' It's bad for everybody. It takes away choice and control over our own lives, and pours this into these bureaucratic, one-size-fits-all systems.

"So every time the debt ceiling comes close to hitting, pollsters ask Americans what should be done, and often more than 70 percent say it shouldn't be raised. Yet of course it always is. So, there's the adult thing, American citizens do in order to end this debt draft manifesto, as well as how do we get young people to truly care about the debt? It's almost like they just seem to tend to gravitate to whichever candidate has the sleekest campaign or the hippest marketing, but almost none seem to care about the fact that they're going to have to work to pay off America's debt. It's almost like they just don't get it.

"Let me take young people first, and this is something I talk about at endthedebtdraft.com in detail. The problem is people have been throwing around the numbers about debt for a long time at young people, and they basically kind of shrug and go, 'That sounds pretty bad.' The reason is that these programs are always treated as moral, and young people are very idealistic. They tend to be idealistic, and what they're going to be motivated by is doing what's good and pursuing what's good, and yet, they've been taught that these programs are morally good. So they're not inspired to fight them. It seems like, 'Yeah, that's kind of a policy wonk issue.'

"This is a moral issue, because it means instead of being free to make something of your life, you're going to be turned into a servant, and that's morally wrong. That's not how individuals should interact with each other. We should have a society where nobody's forced to serve anybody, where we're all free to really make something of our lives and do something with our lives and build a life for ourselves and if they can see it in those moral terms, when it's not just a number, but they see, 'Yeah, I wanted to start a business, and now I'm going to have to put that off for an extra year or two. That's awful.'
They can start to see that this really is a moral issue that they can get inspired by not just to ward off a disaster, but to really achieve something great, which is a freer, more prosperous, more moral society. As far as older Americans, most parents and grandparents don't want to devastate their children's future.

"We've been taught two things. One is that these programs are moral, and two is that they've earned their benefits, because they've been taught in effect that Social Security, these are big savings programs where you pay during your working career and then you get back your investment later in life. What they have to realize is there's no savings there. All they're getting back, every penny that they get has to come out of the pockets of their children and grandchildren. If they understood that, then they would be willing to question these programs as well. That's why I would like to see older Americans start giving political cover to those who oppose old age welfare programs. Why don't we have an organization called 'Social Security Recipients Against Social Security,' so that when somebody comes out and says, 'What this program is doing to people is morally wrong,' they can no longer smear them as people who just want to throw grandma off the cliff."

Bennett Group Financial Services LLC, based in Washington, D.C., is a comprehensive financial services firm committed to providing opportunities to clients' as they seek long-term financial success. Its customized programs are designed with the potential to help grow, lower overall risk and conserve client assets by delivering a high level of personalized service and skill. For more information, call 866-286-2268 or visit www.bennettgroupfinancial.com.

Securities offered through Western International Securities Inc. (WIS), member FINRA/SIPC. BGFS and WIS are separate and unaffiliated entities.

About Dawn Bennett
Dawn Bennett is CEO and Founder of Bennett Group Financial Services. She hosts a national radio program on www.WMAL.com called Financial Myth Busting http://www.financialmythbusting.com. She can be reached on Twitter @DawnBennettFMB or on Facebook Financial Myth Busting with Dawn Bennett or dbennett@bennettgroupfinancial.com

For more information on this press release visit: http://www.releasewire.com/press-releases/release-3.htm

It's über- confusing today as to what the catalyst is for stock surges, or, for that matter, stock drops.

Washington, D.C. -- (ReleaseWire) -- 04/08/2014 -- Even with the collapse of Ukraine sovereignty, the U.S. GDP downward revision, which was ugly (they almost cut it in half), and the miss in pending home sales, (also very ugly), the continued meltdown of emerging and frontier markets, the U.S. markets ended up higher this week. Can you believe it? asks Dawn Bennett, CEO of Bennett Group Financial Services.

Go figure, right? It's ueber- confusing today as to what the catalyst is for stock surges, or, for that matter, stock drops. Are we just missing something somewhere that offers equally compelling position fundamentals to support last week's run-up? No, sorry. We are not seeing any strong, positive fundamentals out there. All we're seeing right now is a highly compressed, speculative market that is completely ignoring the fundamentals, which in simplified terms, means that the market is still completely disconnected from reality.

Now, always remember that investment markets are nothing more than a means of sharing the wealth that companies and countries create, which is why you always have to keep it real. Investors always have to be honest about what's going on when determining when and where to invest. Now, in the medium term and in the long term, remember that real, true-blue fundamentals drive prices, always. Of course, the converse is also true. The lack of strong fundamentals should push everything down. Short-term, we're not seeing that. But medium to long-term, the collapse of the Ukrainian government is not likely to be the last emerging market to begin falling apart.

UBS' George Magnus believes that the next global economic crisis lightning rod will be the emerging markets, and we're thinking he just might be onto something here. As the emerging market meltdown now seems to be turning into a major global destabilization type of event, look out below or you will be crushed. Ukraine might have been the first to start the emerging markets' domino to topple, but Turkey and Thailand and Nigeria and Venezuela and Argentina aren't far behind, as they're also headed down this dangerous path.

So, who's to blame for all this you've got to be asking? Well the Federal Reserve is; they are the major problem. The Fed drove rates so low and provided too much liquidity, which was used to cover up the problems of both the emerging market economies and the developed market economies, the U.S., Europe and Japan. Since the emerging market outflows are from the popped Fed QE bubble, it's going to start accelerating.

Unfortunately, that acceleration will lead to more political, government and market collapses. Worldwide, a lot of countries and companies borrowed money at ridiculously cheap rates. They've been doing it for the last three years, which is when the Fed started to do all of their quantitative easing and gave too much liquidity to the system. It's been covering up, like a veil, so many of the financial and economic disfigurements and many of their issues. These problems were never addressed in order to fix them. We are now facing a massive mess of a problem. This Fed-made disaster that's taking place worldwide is a direct blowback from ultra-loose Fed monetary po licy.

A problem that encouraged even the legendary value investor Warren Buffett to be sitting now on the single largest amount of cash in the history of his 50 years as an investor. Since Mr. Buffett typically advocates being fully invested, this tells you something important. Also George Soros, another billionaire, was highly hedged with short positions and precious metals to protect himself from the downside that could possibly happen. So, if both Soros and Buffett are trying to set themselves up to protect their holdings at the same time by owning assets that could benefit from a drop, then retail investors should consider it too.

So, we put together some portfolio ideas and some justifications for when looking at a portfolio. Here's the first idea. Both gold and silver are significantly above their 200-day moving average (Source: Bloomberg). They are also a play on monetary instability and central bank monetary policy failure.

My second idea is Japan. I wouldn't be long in their markets. Maybe consider shorting them, because the last time the Bank of Japan raised the Japanese sales tax, the Nikkei fell about 40 perce nt. That happened in June 1997 to October of 1998 and guess what? The Japanese sales tax is going up again from 5 percent to 8 percent, that's a 3 percent hike, this April 2014.

Here's a last idea. Watch the Chinese renminbi very closely. It traded at 6.1450 to the dollar, its lowest value in 10 months (source: Bloomberg).

This may not sound like a big deal, but it is. The renminbi currency is controlled currently by the Chinese central bank, the People's Bank of China.

We're conservative money managers believing in global diversification for worldwide liquidity. We are not people that feel like every dollar needs to be invested at all times. And I also don't buy into a lot of stuff that goes on in the markets nowadays, because it's not running up on true fundamentals. When the medium-term and long-term hits, the true fundamentals are the only thing somebody should value.

Securities offered through Western International Securities, Inc. Member FINRA & SIPC. Bennett Group Financial and Western International Securities, Inc. are separate & unaffiliated companies.

For more information on this press release visit: http://www.releasewire.com/press-releases/release-3.htm