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The Permanent Portfolio: How an entrepreneur invests — with Craig Rowland

permanent portfolio

As a successful entrepreneur, Craig Rowland knew how to take measured risks.

He does the same now when investing his portfolio. In his recent book The Permanent Portfolio: Harry Browne’s Long-Term Investment Strategy, Rowland describes Harry Browne’s famous Permanent Portfolio strategy and why it’s so effective at helping him succeed in the market.

Please join us for an interesting discussion about managing money, taking risks, and Harry Browne’s famous easy-to-implement no-brainer investment strategy.

Listen to the FULL episode

About Craig Rowland

Craig Rowland -- author of Permanent PortfolioCraig Rowland is a software entrepreneur with multiple successful start-ups who sold his previous company to Cisco Systems, Inc. His company produced a real-time network attack response and analysis system. He has also worked for the Chief of Naval Operations – U.S. Pentagon, with a start-up founded by members of the Air Force Information Warfare Squadron (also acquired by Cisco).

More resources

Even More Resources

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Get off the investment roller coaster by getting the Lending Club gospel

Lending Club produced a nice new video I liked and thought you’d appreciate seeing.

In 5 years, the firm has underwritten over $1B in peer-to-peer loans and is on fire. As I’ve written before, I believe the direct personal loan is on its way to becoming a new asset class in investor portfolios, thanks to Lending Club.

Additional resources

  • Listen to my interview with Lending Club founder and CEO, Renaud Laplanche

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Predict the next M&A – with Arye Schreiber

M&A crowdsourcing

By most account, the M&A process is fundamentally flawed.

Incentives aren’t aligned — from advisors to bankers to CEOs. All want more M&A, not more successful deals.

This week’s guest on Tradestreaming has created a crowdsourced model for investors to help predict the next successful merger and acquisition. Arye Schreiber, founder of Merjerz,  has created what he feels is a better model to align incentives, encouraging fundamentally more successful M&A activity.

And investors can be first to know.

Listen to the FULL episode

About Arye Schreiber

Arye is the founder of Merjerz. His previous experience has been in corporate law, advising multinational companies on M&A.

Continue reading “Predict the next M&A – with Arye Schreiber”

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Unleashing your inner investor – with Howard Reisman

Some of the best investing tools were born out of an individual’s personal needs.

StockRover is that type of tool. Created by Howard Reisman as a solution to his investing research, StockRover is a tool for motivated individual investors developed by individual investors.

If you like to delve deeper, run screens, and really research your investments, StockRover is an awesome tool.

Howard joins us today for this edition of Tradestreaming Radio.

Sponsors I mentioned

invest with motif investingInvest like a fund manager with Motif Investing. Customizable portfolios & low-cost trading. See how it works

Listen to the FULL episode

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Build trading strategies without the need to code – with Rob Johnson

Have you wanted to test an investing strategy but lack the tools and programming knowledge to sufficiently see if it works?

QuantBlocks was designed for you — build and test trading strategies without programming knowledge. It’s drag-and-drop simple. Founder Rob Johnson joins Tradestreaming Radio to discuss how QuantBlocks scratched his own personal itch and how investors of all types use his technology to beat the market.

Check out our sponsor

invest with motif investingTired of disappointing returns? Check out Motif Investing—a platform for investing in unique ideas. Explore over 80 customizable portfolios now.

Listen to the FULL interview


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Using social and crowdsourcing to make better investment decisions – with Alexander Wallin

Many investors know intuitively that making investment research more social SHOULD lead to better outcomes.

The truth is, we’re just beginning to figure out how social media can impact investment performance…and a new firm, SprinkleBit is going to help forward this conversation in a major way.

SprinkleBit is rolling out a full-suite of research and trading tools, all centered around the social aspect of investment research. Founder and CEO Alexander Wallin joins us to talk about social investing, how to empower investors to make better decisions, and his product roadmap to roll-out social enabled trading.

Listen to the FULL episode

About Alex

co-founder and CEO of SprinkleBitAlexander Wallin is the co-founder and CEO of SprinkleBit.

Continue reading “Using social and crowdsourcing to make better investment decisions – with Alexander Wallin”

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Beginner’s Guide to Motif Investing

The investing landscape has changed tremendously over the past few years — mostly in ways that directly benefit individual investors.

  • Transparency is increasing
  • Fees are decreasing
  • Brokers are being phased out in favor of Registered Investment Advisors
  • Assets are moving from expensive, actively managed mutual funds to low cost, passively managed exchange traded funds (ETFs)

It’s this last piece that is going to serve as the focal point for this post. In fact, assets invested in U.S. ETFs just exceeded $1 trillion.

ETFs growing like weeds, investors struggle to keep up

If ETFs have evolutionized (it’s not really a revolution) our investment choices, information and commentary on how to use ETFs haven’t quite kept pace. Investors struggle to understand exactly what an ETF’s strategy is and how it’s managed.

Heck, professionals are drowning in trying to make sense of all the new ETF offerings.

A new platform, called Motif Investing, may be changing all this…

Continue reading “Beginner’s Guide to Motif Investing”

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App of the Week: HelloWallet

As much as we talk about the advances in investing technologies/platforms on Tradestreaming, personal finance tools are really kicking it.

One of the most popular is HelloWallet. Like the model that its predecessor Mint.com pioneered, HelloWallet is meant to not only track and manage personal spending/budgets, but optimize them as well.

Visualizing your financial life

If you’re like me, you’re a visual person. One of the hardest things to tackle with personal finance is to really understand all the ins-and-outs, money-in/money-out.

Our lives are complex. Spending on individual items needs to be put into the larger context of everything going on in our financial lives.

HelloWallet does a powerful job representing data with useable visuals and the entire service is centered around goals, the guideposts that help determine what we should — and shouldn’t — be doing financially.

After hooking up your bank account and credit cards and filling out simple budgetary items, HelloWallet begins spitting out personalized daily guidance. These zen-like tips are comprised of ways to address lowering spending, reorganizing debt, saving more, etc.

Social benchmarking and conflict-free

HelloWallet also provides social benchmarking by explaining what others in your social/geographic group spend on particular items so you can tell whether you’re overspending or not.

One of the gripes people have with Mint is that its revenue model is to refer its users to 3rd party sites and receive remuneration for any money spent on that new relationship.

HelloWallet doesn’t do that and makes a point of emphasizing that it’s conflict-free. The app comes with a free, no-credit-card-needed 30 day trial. It’s generally $8.95 per month.

Check out HelloWallet.

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Company Profile: Betterment

Name: Betterment

Website: www.betterment.com

What it does: Betterment has one of the easiest-to-use, slickest interfaces to manage a balanced portfolio for long-term investors. Fund your account (you can automate this) and dial in your preferred risk mix and Betterment chooses a basket of exchange-traded funds (ETFs) for your portfolio in accordance to Modern Portfolio Theory. You don’t ever need to decide on what to buy if that’s not your thing.

Particular strengths: For investors who don’t want to be overwhelmed with investing decisions or jargon about individual securities, Betterment has done a really effective job removing the confusing part by getting investors to focus on what really matters: setting goals, focusing on time-frame, and risk.

How popular is it: As of November 2011, Betterment reported that it had 10,000 accounts and $36 million under management.

The Company


Management: Betterment was founded by Jonathan Stein, an experienced professional on the technology side of the financial industry.

Company Size: Betterment has 10 employees (Source)

Outside Investors: Bessemer Venture Partners led an investment round of $3 million at the end of 2010.

Competitors: As an online investment advisor, Betterment competes with Personal Capital and Wealthfront.

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Investing in people with peer to peer loans – with Lending Club’s Renaud Laplanche

Lending Club's Renaud Laplanche on marketplace lending

I have to admit: investing in peer to peer loans didn’t initially appeal to me.

I thought it would be hard to assess the risk in lending to individuals — after all, that’s what banks get paid the big bucks for, right?

But 5 years after Lending Club first launched its website, the firm has pioneered a whole industry, not just to say a new asset class. There have been over $1B in p2p loans underwritten and investors like me are now using p2p loans as a core holding in the fixed income part of their portfolios.

Founder Renaud Laplanche joins me on Tradestreaming Radio to talk about how the p2p loan industry cures some major inefficiencies in the market for capital, does a better job sizing up and personalizing risk, and how his firm and industry might just eat the banking system’s future lunch.

Listen to the FULL episode

Continue reading “Investing in people with peer to peer loans – with Lending Club’s Renaud Laplanche”