Financial Articles

Has your share lost 20% of its value since you acquired it? Has your unit trust investment been steadily falling since the day you bought it?

Selling a losing position and reinvesting the money in a more profitable security is probably the most logical tactic to apply in order to enhance the overall value of your portfolio.

This technique can be one of the most difficult to execute. You have to ask yourself if you had made a mistake with your investment in the first place and you must also decide whether to sell or hold on to the depreciating asset. When you can easily find recommendations on what to buy, it’s harder to get advice on when to cut your losses.

To minimize the odds of ending up with worthless share certificates or depreciating unit trusts, you should establish a sell strategy. This is when you can think most clearly about why and when to sell. You could be too upset to think rationally if you start to analyze your investment when its value drops to a level that you can’t tolerate.

So, a sell strategy helps you to avoid an emotional decision making that usually leads to costly mistakes, like the knee-jerk reaction of getting out fast when the stock market drops.

A well-defined sell strategy has cut-loss triggers to prompt certain actions, which must include an evaluation of the condition of your investment and its future potential, before you sell your losing investment.

Cut-loss triggers act like an insurance policy, which is protecting your portfolio against catastrophic losses as they remind you to assess your investment or to sell it. These triggers are used to make sure that mistakes are not more costly than they could be.

Some investors have different investing profiles and strategies, thus determine your cut-loss triggers based on your personal risk tolerance and investing time frame. To do so, first, consider the risk level that you’re able to tolerate when selecting the asset. Say, for instance, you decided to tolerate a loss of 15% to 20%. Then, from here, you can determine your selling point. If your investment falls in this range, hold on to it.

However, investors with a short investment period may prefer a smaller percentage decline of perhaps 3%, because it avoids big losses. On the other hand, investors with a three to five year time frame can tolerate a higher percentage decline as a losing investment has time to recover its position.

Action triggers are also part of a sell strategy. For instance, you decide to sell your investment if it drops 8% below your purchase price. Set a warning point at 5% to prompt you to take action by looking for information that can be used to evaluate the future potential of your investment. You should also consider the next asset to invest in before your existing investment continues to depreciate to its cut-loss level.

Some investors convert these triggers to stop-loss orders, which are instructions to the brokers to sell their shares at a predetermined price. These instructions are useful when you’re unable to monitor your stocks and evaluate your investments over a period of time.

Logistics and Wholesaling Management are considered today of vital importance if one studies closely NAVISTAR and UPS, two well-established companies that have introduced logistics as their main business units.

The business principles support that the manufacturer makes the products, or provides the services, in order to attain the ultimate goal of satisfying its customers. In order to succeed every business activity is directly related with the principles of logistics that act as the “right hand” of a sound marketing plan. In fact logistics can be described by the following principles: finding the Right product or service; offering it in the adequate quantity and right condition to the right customer; having it available at the right time and place; and selling it at the right cost.

Today, logistics information systems that have been improved by the technology associated with the scanning systems are directly related with the transportation, storage, inventory management and customer service departments of every corporation. Strategies, such as Quick Response (QR) and Efficient Customer Response (ECR) are contributing in the success of logistics in the contemporary highly challenging environments business operate and are accompanied by competitive pricing, consumer demographics, market share goals and other factors of marketing management, providing the new base of global competition.

The key issue for an effective logistics system is for products to spend less time in the warehouses and to be delivered at the stores on time. This way, manufacturers reduce the amount of inventory they have to keep and maintain and have thus realized that the component of logistics actually adds value. The notion of Just-In-Time strategies and Safety Stocks are still considered extremely important since these are the tools through which a sound logistics plan is supported.

In particular, the logistics department can become a company’s value added feature as it manages procurement, reduces manufacture involvement, eliminates invoices and time-consuming practices, speeds communication via EDI and provides quality assurance. In simple words, a sound logistics system link better the supplier with the final customer and makes it feasible to conduct audit quality tests and improve the overall effectiveness of the system.

According to business experts a market opportunity is discovered when the order cycle is compressed, the time requirements are reduced and everyone is involved in the common objectives. Thus, logistics, by containing quality and quick response systems, are the key to introduce a successful management plan.

When you consider a life long relationship with a Long Term Care Insurance company, you want to rest in the comfort of knowing that you have settled on a company with the highest possible ratings and reputation. After all, you will need them to be there for you in a pinch when you need to file a claim for the specified benefits.

With a serious relationship like long term care insurance, reliability is really, really important, don’t you agree? So our topic today is how to check out a the long term care insurance company to make sure that they meet the highest standards.

In my opinion, the safest thing to do is to work directly with the long term care insurance Buyer’s Advocate, because you can be assured that only top companies and policies will be considered.

In any case, over ten years as an observer of the long term care insurance marketplace, I’m not aware of even one case of fraudulent behavior by an insurance company.

Still, it makes good sense to check into a long term care insurance company’s market behavior, history, ratings, consumer confidence and their records with state regulatory agencies.

1. Call your State Department of Insurance.

2. Ask for Consumer Assistance.

3. Request data on long term care insurance companies, then for each carrier you are interested in, ask for the company’s “Annual Sales Figures for long term care insurance”. Also get the total number of Complaints for both Facility Coverage and for Home Care Coverage. Then ask for their total “Long term care insurance Complaints Ratio” or “Long term care insurance Complaints per Million”. Compare this for several companies to get a feel for consumer confidence.

4. Have your long term care insurance agent obtain in writing the company’s current A.M. Best Rating. It must be A- or above. Accept no B+ or lower ratings unless you have health conditions which prevent coverage with a higher rated company.

5. If you are really serious, you can visit the Department of Insurance in person, and ask to see the “Rate Logs” to determine how many times, if any, a company has raised rates on any group of long term care insurance poicyholders in your state. A history of multiple rate increases over more than a few years would be a red flag.

6. Go to the Public Library - Ask reference desk for insurance rating books, specifically ones like A.M. Best, Weiss Research, S&P, Moody’s, etc.

Do this before you make your commitment to one company or another. Sure, it’s a little work, but you and your family will depend on this long term care insurance company in the caregiving years, and that Is a time when you want to minimize hassles. You’ll be glad you did.

Copyright 2006 Clay Cotton