Music in the Park/Investment Talk

I am becoming more and more a fan of Good Morning America, this morning they sponsored a brief concert by Daughtry and two weeks ago they had Rascal Flatts performing, it's nice to enjoy the last few sips of my morning coffee under the auspicious sky over Bryant Park at 8:40 in the morning. It just starts the day off on the right note. Plus it is Friday the glory of all days, the jobs report came out today and saying that we added 157K jobs to the payrolls this month which puts our unemployment rate at a nice little 4.5%, under what many economists believe to be "Full Employment" which means that the economy is most likely in good shape despite what the GDP revision downward yesterday might have us believe. So for those of you who own any broad index funds this should be a happy, even more so with the Core PCE Deflator coming in at .1% under consensus estimates of up .2%. The reason I bring these weighty matters up on a beautiful Friday morning is because part of my dream of living a laid back life is to live frugally enough to save a good portion of my funds so that one day I too could retire to a life of leisure, albeit if only a meager on, and live off the profits of my portfolio. I happen to favor broad based index funds that allow even the laziest amongst us to receive the markets returns. Now I know some of you will speak up about the rewards of being an active investor, you'll most likely to pristine examples of stock picking prowess like Warren Buffett, Bill Miller, Peter Lynch or active traders like George Soros and Stevie Cohen but one must remember that these titans of Wall St. work very very very long hours and who wants to do that. Hedgefund.net, which tracks the returns of 4823 actively managed hedge funds reported that hedge fund returned a whopping 11.9% to their investors last year, not bad but still not beating the 12.8% return of the S&P 500 which any Joe off the street could have purchased via an index fund. I myself am partial to Fidelity's four-in-one index fund, it allows you to invest in 4 broad indices, with a fund allocation of 55% S&P, 15% International, 15% Extended Market (smaller cap equities) and 15% US Treasuries. How about that diversification at the click of a button and it has no load and an expense ratio of under 10 basis points (.1%). So for those of us who can learn to save and live within our means, we are able to achieve similar returns to the Wall St big shots without having to do any of the work. There you have it democracy in action.