Inside The Poolside Launch Party For Fergie's New Vodka Line


Voli launch

Fergie likes to party—she also likes to be able to wake up the next morning to work out, too.

So when rapper Pitbull, over drinks during a Dolphins game in Miami (Fergie is part-owner of the team), told her about the low-calorie vodka company he had just become part-owner of, the pop star was sold.

"I throw myself into the companies that I partner with and I don't want to put my name on anything I don't believe in or that feels false," Fergie said. She has also partnered with Avon and the Wet & Wild clothing franchise. "People can sense when something isn't truthful."

Today, both Pitbull and Fergie are equity owners in Voli Vodka, a "light" vodka claiming between 25 percent and 40 percent fewer calories than leading brands.

"It's something I wanted in my life for years," Fergie said at a press conference at The James Hotel in New York City for the launch of her new line of low-cal liquors. "It's for those who have healthy lifestyle—who get up in the morning and work out, who do have careers, but who also like to play and have a good time."

See our photos from Fergie's launch party>

Just don't compare reality TV star Bethenny Frankel's super-successful Skinnygirl brand of spirits to Voli Vodka. "First of all, we're delicious. We are a super premium, imported product. Skinnygirl is an RTD [ready-to-drink] and I give them credit for what they've accomplished in their category," Voli CEO and founder Adam Kammenstein told Business Insider.

"We are an ultra-premium product but at a value-price point," explains Kamenstein, who left his job as a federal prosecutor in Los Angeles to start the spirits company. "So we don't compare ourselves to anybody."

Adam Kamenstein Fergie Voli Vodka Launch"Our sales volume grew approximately 1,000 percent over 2011 as we expanded from four to 45 markets in the United States," he said.

Adds Kamenstein of the celebrity partnerships:

"The one thing we were never interested in doing was finding someone who was simply a face for the brand, a paid celebrity. We were interested in a partnership with celebrities who had an authentic relationship to what the brand is about and that wanted to be actively involved with the brand as true partners, not just as faces up on billboards or magazines. Of course we're going to put their faces up on billboards and magazines but 90 percent of their involvement with the brand is not visible to the public."

"I'm loving the businesswoman role," the Black Eyed Peas singer told Business Insider. "It's empowering."

Welcome to brunch. Waitresses pass out complimentary Voli cocktails upon arrival.

You have a choice of Voli "Pink Lemonade," "The Flirt" or "Blushing Berry."

Or let the mixologist make you something special.

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

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Wall Street's Analysts Are Finally Starting To Perk Up


It's pretty ironic.

Wall Street's analysts have a reputation for being too bullish on stocks.  In fact, Reuters' Nishant Kumar and Lawrence Wright had a big write-up about this on Thursday.

However, during the monster bull run of the last few months, analysts have been net negative when issuing their upgrades and downgrades.

Bespoke Investment Group notes that the recent negativity had been particularly peculiar. "Normally, a new year brings analyst optimism where outlooks on the year ahead are bullish," they write.

In more recent weeks, it seems analysts have returned to wearing their rose-colored glasses (see green bars in the chart below).

But with the stock markets up significantly, are we to take this as a good sign? Or is it a contrarian sell signal?

chart

SEE ALSO: The Best And Worst Stock Pickers On Wall Street >

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Wall Street Hasn?t Trained A Real Stockbroker In Almost Twenty Years


Stockbrokers are going extinct.  Wall Street hasn’t trained a real stockbroker in nearly twenty years. Today, stockbrokers have been replaced with “financial consultants” (or whatever they choose to call themselves) who do nothing more than gather clients’ assets, outsource the actual investment management to third parties, and collect fees.

Is the demise of the stockbroker a good thing for investors? We say no, it’s very bad.

Stockbrokers get “Gorman-ized”

Roll the clock back to the mid 1990s, a time when retail commissions were spiraling downward.  For firms like Merrill Lynch, it was a serious situation as their brokerage units were highly dependent on commission revenues.  Additionally, their sales forces were growing to the point that it was getting increasingly difficult to supervise them.  Who did Merrill turn to? Who else but the famed consulting firm McKinsey & Company.

With the help of McKinsey, Merrill set out to persuade regulators to allow brokerage firms to offer asset-based fee accounts (in lieu of commissions), something that brokerage firm weren’t allowed to do at that point.  After some slick regulatory footwork, in 1999 the SEC adopted a de facto rule allowing these new fee-based brokerage accounts, and not surprisingly that rule became known as the Merrill Lynch Rule.

Working at McKinsey on the Merrill account in the 1990s was none other than James Gorman, the current Chairman and CEO of Morgan Stanley.  In 1999, Merrill hired Mr. Gorman to run its marketing department and to oversee the new fee-based strategy.  Mr. Gorman eventually went on to run Merrill’s sales force, successfully converting Merrill’s stockbrokers into this new breed of asset gatherers.  In many respects, fee-based brokerage accounts are the brainchild of James Gorman.

Mr. Gorman’s solution for Merrill Lynch was brilliant.  Under this new model, Merrill’s brokerage unit would have predictable and stable revenues.  It was also much easier to train new brokers to pick out mutual funds than it was to train them to actually buy stocks and bonds for customers (and easier for the compliance department too).

Like most of Merrill’s innovations, fee-based brokerage accounts took off like wildfire.  But as brilliant as this new model was for the brokerage industry, investors have been harmed.  This new business model was designed to benefit brokerage firms, not investors.

Life after stockbrokers – it’s the investors who suffer 

Frustrated investors complain to us all the time that they have very limited investment alternatives – they can either use high cost active managers (mutual funds, separate account management, hedge funds, etc.) or low cost index funds.  What investors are slowly figuring out is that active management simply doesn’t work as advertised.

Last week, S&P published its 10th Annual Mutual Fund Performance Report.  According to the report, 84% of actively managed funds did worse than their respective indices, and a staggering 96% of large cap growth funds (that’s almost all of them) failed to beat their benchmark.  The longer-term numbers aren’t much better.  So, by default, indexing has become the logical choice for most investors. 

But what ever happened to individuals putting together their own investment portfolios?  That’s right, actually buying stocks and bonds in a brokerage account.  That cost effective option has gone the way of the stockbroker, and most investors don’t even consider it an option.

The sad reality is that in a world without stockbrokers, investors are reluctant to take the plunge and buy individual stocks and bonds.  Granted, some will tune in to the Jim Cramer show and watch him breakdown six stocks in 60 seconds and give it a try, but these people inevitability confuse investing with short term or day trading.  Real investors don’t treat their investment portfolios like a game show.

Does he eat his own cooking? 

We think that investors need to take back control of their investment portfolios and learn how to invest in a portfolio of individual stocks and bonds.  And that’s where a trustworthy, good old-fashioned stockbroker is worth his or her weight in gold. 

Mr. Gorman changed Wall Street, and that’s not an easy thing to do. We wonder if Mr. Gorman eats his own cooking.  Is his personal investment portfolio chock-full of these high cost, underperforming investment products?

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5 Surprisingly Smart Ways to Blow $1,000 of Your Tax Refund

What is Adjusted Gross Income (AGI)?

Adjusted gross income (AGI) can directly impact the deductions and credits you are eligible for, which can wind up reducing the amount of taxable income you report on your tax return.


Brought to you by TurboTax.com

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Source: http://www.dailyfinance.com/2012/03/23/tax-refund-surprising-smart-ideas/

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How Debt Management Services Can Help You?

Many defaulters watch debt management as a challenging goal to realize. What they don’t understand is that will debt management is a very straightforward task. Trying to keep records as well as sticking to an arrangement budget is the main element to realizing this target. In addition, this defaulter must be able to live within [...]

Source: http://www.legaldebthelponline.com/2012/03/23/how-debt-management-services-can-help-you/

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Average Joes Are Playing The Junk Bond Market More Than Ever


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NEW YORK (AP) — Americans have a thing for junk.

Stock prices have doubled in the past three years, and everyday investors keep pulling money out of stocks. But they're happy to lend billions of dollars to companies with deep debts and embarrassing credit scores.

They're doing it through junk bonds, the risky investments made infamous by the disgraced investment banker Michael Milken in the 1980s. Americans have never shoveled so much money into junk bond funds to start a year.

Since the start of January, everyday investors have put $12 billion into mutual funds that buy high-yield bonds, the polite name for junk. That's more than the $8.2 billion they invested in all of 2011. The full-year record was $28 billion in 2009.

"If the trend continues we'll blow that number away," says Jeff Tjornehoj, head of Americas Research at Lipper, the company that tracks mutual funds and compiled the numbers.

Buying a junk bond makes you a lender to companies with heavy debts and low credit ratings. That's why investors demand higher returns in exchange for handing over their money.

Junk bonds still carry a lingering black mark from Milken, who pioneered the market in the 1980s while at Drexel Burnham Lambert. Milken was convicted of insider trading and violating other federal securities laws and has since remade himself as a philanthropist.

And then there's that unpleasant name.

"A lot of people look at high-yield with a jaded viewpoint," says Jason Pride, director of investment strategy at Glenmede, an investment management company. "They think, 'Why would you own anything other than stocks?'"

Stocks have been on a roll. The Standard & Poor's 500 index is up 11 percent this year and has doubled since it hit its low point during the Great Recession in March 2009.

Professional money managers usually predict disaster when the public flocks to an investment outside of the stock market. To them, it's often a reliable "sell" signal. If the average Joe shows up, the pros think it's time to go.

Yet Pride is one of many money managers steering his customers to junk bonds. One reason is the lower risk: When a reckless company goes bankrupt, bondholders and other creditors still get paid.

And most people piling into junk bonds have no need to worry about the bankruptcy of any particular company. Buying into mutual funds that invest in more than 100 companies dilutes the danger of one going under.

The bigger draw is the yield. The typical high-yield bond pays 7.2 percent. With interest rates at record lows, the benchmark U.S. Treasury security, the 10-year note, pays 2.2 percent. It paid as little as 1.76 percent last October.

"Think of high-yield as the middle ground between bonds and stocks," Tjornehoj says.

Still scarred by the 2008 meltdown, Americans seem comfortable in that middle ground. They've bought junk bonds in such great numbers that prices have risen from as low as 91 cents on the dollar last October to a recent $1.01. That's pushed borrowing costs down from above 10 percent.

The main drawback is that junk bonds are among the more hazardous bond investments around. Rating agencies, using another delicate term, label the bonds "speculative grade." They're the candidates considered most likely to miss an interest payment and go bankrupt.

The price of a company's high-yield bond often shadows its stock. But bondholders are better off when a company runs into trouble. In a bankruptcy, owners of high-yield bonds count as creditors, like banks, and can expect to get back around 40 cents on the dollar. Owners of stock can expect nothing.

Just two years ago, Moody's warned that companies and the federal government faced a tidal wave of debts coming due, what's known as a maturity wall. Forced to compete with the U.S. government for new loans, companies could wind up paying crushing interest rates and be pushed into bankruptcy. News reports imagined doomsday scenarios coming from the junk bond market and referred to the Mayan calendar and the world ending in late 2012.

What happened? "Companies kicked out the wall," says Kevin Cassidy, senior credit officer at Moody's.

With interest rates at all-time lows, companies managed to borrow cheaply and used the money from investors to refinance their debts. They pushed their due dates years into the future and also have smaller interest payments.

"If the Federal Reserve hadn't kept rates as low as they kept them, and if the economy hadn't picked up, you would have had a scarier situation," Cassidy says.

Despite the predictions of doom, defaults remain rare. Just 2.2 percent of companies that issue low-rated bonds defaulted in the last year, according to Moody's. That rate will probably inch toward the 5 percent historical average as interest rates rise.

Jack Ablin, chief investment officer at Harris Private Bank, says he understands why many of his clients are drawn to high-yield bonds. They saw stocks plunge for no apparent reason in the Flash Crash of 2010 and watched the Dow take wild swings last August. Now they're encouraged by the slowly improving economy and willing to take a step out of cash. Buying junk is a way to stay in bonds while creeping closer to the stock market, Ablin says.

"People are skeptical of the stock market for very good reasons."

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