“Living on $1700 a month sounds like a very slow, painful existence. Not what I planned for in my retirement.”  If you aren’t already aware of it, the baby boomers have started to retire. They first hit the system a few years ago. Over the next twenty to thirty years, our culture will be challenged as never before by the largest shift of population ever to leave a work force and begin retirement.

The wild market swings of late are most likely down to hedge funds says Keith Fitz-Gerald. These big money movers are liquidating assets to meet margin calls, causing chaos in the markets. Keith has four tips on how to dodge the worst of the damage.

Last week, market volatility reached record levels. Dan Amoss says the wild gyrations in stocks are the result of hedge funds liquidating assets to cover their highly-leveraged positions. This means some good firms — especially those providing vital functions in the food and energy markets — are now massively undervalued.

Market volatility has investors flooding into Treasury bonds. This has pushed yields down and created a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity in muni bonds, according to Oxford Club’s Alexander Green.

I’ve long held that mutual funds are full of bad habits, like a boy who can’t stop picking his nose and burping at the dinner table. If you had to design a poor investor, you need look no further than the typical mutual fund.

The name “Nifty Fifty” came to represent the “one-decision” stocks of the early 1970s. They were the Cokes and the Disneys of the world… Fifty names you always bought simply because you couldn’t go wrong owning them. Or so investors thought…

Investing in stock markets in a growing economy like India will generally give you better long term returns than investing in bank accounts. The logic is that, when an economy is growing, it means that the various businesses that make up the entire economy are - in total - growing.

The GDP, gross domestic product, of any economy is the sum of all economic activity that occurs in every household, in every company, at all levels across the economy. So, if you buy a pair of jeans at the store there is a lot of GDP involved.

There’s an old Wall Street adage that tells us that “the trend is your friend.” And there’s a witty bit of wisdom we’ve developed here at Money Morning to help guide our readers and us that says: “Go global or go home.”

US markets marked the strongest second quarter start since 1938, reports Money Morning.

The rally in financial stocks led the three major indexes to post gains of more than 3%.

At the New York close, the blue-chip Dow Jones Industrial Average Index had posted a gain of 391.96 points (3.20%), to close at 12,654.85.