The most efficient way to produce anything is to bring together under one management as many as possible of the activities needed to turn out the product. -Peter Drucker

Managed investments are funds which are coordinated by a professional financial advisor. The advisor’s responsibility is to research and then invest in a variety of stock options. Managed investments are a mixture of many types of investment vehicles including stocks, bonds, and mutual funds. The benefit of managed investments is that your money is pooled with the money of other investors. This allows for a large amount of money to be invested, creating a stronger more expansive investment portfolio. For example, New Zealand has large managed funds totaling over $50 billion dollars. There are several types of managed investments that include unit trusts, group investments, superannuation funds, and insurance bonds. Each of these investment types have their own attributes and differ on legal issues, taxes, and ownership. If you are interested in a managed investment program it is important to research each of these and make a decision based on which one fits your needs.

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Many people in today’s ever growing economy realize the need to start investing in the future. It may be for their children’s future education, retirement, or in a few years be able to have a higher standard of living. Then why do many people not take the required leap into the investing world? Why, maybe they believe it’s too much work. Maybe it’s that many people don’t want to invest a huge amount of money or even better worry that the stock market is too much like gambling. I would have to object and say the opposite, there is every resource available for individual investors today, with the help of the Internet, to gain knowledge and have very nice portfolio’s as well as gains. But people still think that they can’t fit investing in. All that aside there are alternatives to investing $10k of your own cash and still reaping rewards without having to research and become knowledgeable about the market’s movement and reaction or overall mechanic’s.

So, what does this wanna-be busy investor with no time do? Investment clubs. Yes, you heard me right, there are investment clubs like any other. The main difference between these clubs is this is about profit and making your dollar work for you and also learning while you earn. Some people aren’t familiar or would say whats the point I could just give my money to a broker. Yes you could although there isn’t any motivation or any pride that you did good or bad in that. There is also no real way to learn and earn. And like it seems many Americans are concerned about time equaling money so why not use every minute or second you learn to earn?

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A portfolio is simply a combination of assets. Portfolio theory shows how an investor can reach his optimal portfolio position. Portfolio theory is based on the assumption that the utility of the investor is a function of two factors: mean return and variance (or its square root, the standard deviation) of return. Hence it is also referred to as the mean-variance portfolio theory, or two-parameter portfolio theory. The investor is assumed to prefer a higher mean return to a lower one, and prefer a lower variance of return to a higher one.

The expected return on a portfolio is simply the weighted arithmetic average of the expected returns of the assets constituting the portfolio. The riskiness of a portfolio is measured by the standard deviation of the portfolio s rate of return.

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