Happy New Year!
What a year it's been, too. We added 2.7M jobs this year and that's good because we also added 2.7M people to our population so, essentially, we didn't lose any ground. As more and more people left the labor force (retired, discouraged) however, official unemployment fell from 7% to 5.8%.
We still have 2M less people working thant we did in 2007 – despite adding about 20M people (now 320M). I guess it's progres if one in 10 people are able to find a job, right?
Of course, none of that stuff matters as long as the rich get richer and boy did they – with the Forbes 400 adding $98Bn to their pile of cash in 2014. Now $98Bn is a lot of money for just 400 people to spend – so some of that trickles down to us poor folks who have humble financial newseletters or make expensive cars or pilot privat jets – you know, regular Joes in the top 10% – it's been a very good year for us.
It's been a very good year for the markets with the Nasdaq leading us with a 14.4% gain on the year followed by the S&P at 12.4%, Dow 8.5%, NYSE 5.2% and Russell 4.25%. More impressive than the S&P's 12.4% gain was the fact that we went the ENTIRE YEAR without having more than 3 consecutive down days. That has NEVER happened before, NEVER. We can thank the World's Central Banksters for that – these markets are now so manipulated, they can't go down anymore.
We spent 2014 emphasizing our "Be the House – Not the Gambler" investing strategy and, although the carefully controlled market performance led to low implied volatility (giving us less premium to sell), we still managed to scratch out impressive gains on all five of the virtual portfolios we track for our Members.
Our Short-Term Portfolio acts as a hedge for both our Long-Term Portfolio and our Income Portfolio. It began the year with $100,000 and, generally, we made bearish bets to offset our more bullish portfolios. As you…
