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To help ameliorate the declines experienced during a bear market, the investment community has long advocated diversifying one's equity holdings across various equity asset classes, such as large-cap growth and value, mid-cap growth and value, and international stocks. Yet all the purported benefits of diversification somehow managed to fail spectacularly from late 2007 well into the first quarter of 2009. In fact, despite having their equity holdings distributed across many different types of equity mutual funds and stock holdings, the declines in investors' overall equity portfolio values over the period were unprecedented in the modern era.

Firms that have gone the paperless route offer directions

Daniel C.S. Powell founded Christian Stanley in 2003 as a specialty-finance investment bank predicated upon the rapidly emerging life settlements industry. Powell, a former institutional broker with Morgan Stanley, says that he recognized the unique characteristics of the life settlement asset class and decided to develop a proprietary syndicate of institutional bidders seeking to acquire life settlement assets. "The prime objective of Christian Stanley is to serve as an efficient life settlement clearinghouse for the benefit of the greater economy and senior citizens across America."

Empowering Advisors

Market demand and the state of the economy are drawing more CPAs into financial planning

MOST AMERICANS NOT READY FOR RETIREMENT

Care planning is complicated, but critical

New COSO guidance emphasizes benefits for smaller companies

FASB ISSUES STANDARD FOR NONPROFIT M&A

Although many opponents of value-based accounting claim to have conceptual arguments against it, most of the criticism focuses on implementation issues involving measurement technology and its present limitations (some real and most others imaginary).