I’ve written a lot about financial fraud at Aleph Blog. ?I try to encourage people to be skeptical, because it is genuinely rare when a deal is exceptionally good for an average person. ?Most of the time in life, you are doing pretty well if you are getting a fair deal, particularly when it comes to financial matters. ?Most people selling financial products know more about the product than the?prospective buyer.

Thus, Aleph Blog has written about a wide number of deals that are bad, and those that are outright fraudulent. ?(At the end of this article, there will be a sample of articles that I have written.) ?Not that anyone appointed me, but I regard this as one of my sub-missions, in writing this blog. ?Cleaning up the investment world should be a goal of many legitimate investors, because the cleaner things are, the better the culture of trust will be for legitimate financial products.

Now, Aleph Blog does this service on two bases: free and paid. ?Free is for the simple stuff. ?If you write an e-mail to me asking “Is this legit?” and it is simple enough for me to give a quick answer through a blog post, I will likely (but not certainly) write a post on it, or point you to one I have written. ?I may even answer the companion question, “Is it a smart thing to do?” ?Most of what I do here will fall into the free category.

The complex stuff is another matter. ?I have done analyses like these for prior employers, and on a freelance basis for wealthy individuals and corporations. ?Examples have included:

• Analyzing whether the Permanent Portfolio idea works or not (and other investing theory questions).
• Analyzing a complex tax avoidance deal that involved insurance, securitization, and other factors.
• Analyzing whether a private business deal looks legitimate.
• Analyzing whether a securitization deal looks legitimate.
• Analyzing complex bonds or other securities for value.
• Giving a second opinion on an investment question.
• Giving a second opinion on a new investment product.
• Giving a second opinion on a financial plan.

I like an occasional complex project because it keeps my skills sharp. ?I am a good financial modeler, and though I did not go to the finals the last two years in the Modeloff competition, I placed well in the first round the last two years, and in the second round in 2013 was in the top half, and though I qualified, this year I could not compete in the second round due to a schedule conflict (presbytery meeting).

If a project does not fit my expertise, I will turn it down. ?Why waste your?time and mine? ?If I don’t have slack time, I will turn it down — my investment clients come first. ?But if you have an interesting project that you think might fit me, email me, and let’s talk. ?I am willing to sign confidentiality agreements, and not publish the results if need be.

Beyond that, let’s make the financial world better, and eliminate as many scams as we can.

Articles

• On the ?770? Account?– using life insurance as an asset accumulation tool — generally a bad idea. ?(Gets a lot of hits a my blog regularly), also?Using Life Insurance Products to Fund Long-Term Needs
• Why Are We The Lucky Ones??– on some private securitizations and collateralized loans that never saw the light of day due to my due diligence.
• My continuing articles on promoted stocks
• The Madoff series ? A New Appreciation for the Plumbing, Book Review: No One Would Listen, Book Review: The Club No One Wanted To Join, Book Review: How To Smell a Rat, Book Review: The Wizard of Lies, Enduring Ponzi
• On Con Men?– on a sketchy business plan
• On Con Men, Advanced Edition?– various sorts of?financial products that are usually not good deals
• On Hucksters?– business ideas that were “too good to be true”
• Get a Piece of the Schlock?– On “Rich Dad”
• Selling Options Cheaply (Did You Know?)?– on structured notes, and other dodgy bonds
• On Avoiding Con Men?– being wary of passive income streams generally
• Book Review: The Big Con?– a review of the con men of yesteryear with applications to today
• Permanent Asset Allocation?– on the Permanent Portfolio idea — I have more unpublished behind this.
• Bombing Baby BDC Bonds?– even though the deal has gone well so far, the protections are weak, and the bonds are illiquid
• The Art of Extracting Large Commissions From Investors?– legitimate financial products that you should usually avoid
• Protect Your Older Family & Friends?– scams that prey on the elderly

Hey, thanks for reading… 😉 and play it safe, please.

I’m going to be away for a few days. ?Maybe I will have time to post; most likely I won’t. ?Before I go, I want to thank my readers who have endorsed me at LinkedIn. ?You are most generous in your assessments of my abilities.

But as for now, until there is better clarification of whether it is legitimate for advisors to accept endorsements at their LinkedIn profiles, I am disabling endorsements on my profile. ?For those that want to do the same thing, you can find out how to do it here.

I would just rather be safe than sorry. ?Aside from that, how many people use LinkedIn to find or vet out an investment advisor?

As an aside, I’ve been blogging for about 7.5 years and for the most part, I haven’t hit many dry spells. ?I’m feeling a little dry at present. ?If you have an idea for me on what to write about, you can send it to me here. ?Thanks!

Every 100 posts or so, I take a step back and think about where I have been, and maybe, where things are heading. ?This time, things are a little different.

It started when there was a series of articles published where they were measuring the amount of social media influence various RIAs that blog have. ?The early ones placed me twelfth, and then one placed me fourth, without making a big thing?that the group was limited to RIAs. ?At present (thanks Michael Kitces!), I may be ranked fifth, for what it is worth.

That said, I don’t blog to be at or near the top of anyone’s rankings. ?I’ve learned over the years that blogging is a fickle thing. ?It’s one reason why I keep a wide variety of topics on hand, because those that specialize in one area (such as scandal or crisis) get put out to pasture when everything normalizes.

After that, I decided to write one post to explain my blog to those who were new readers, because there were a lot of them. ?Okay, that was the last century post. ?For what it is worth, that one was around 2530, and this one around 2615.

In the middle of this, I decided to update the WordPress software at my blog, and improve the ability of people to comment here using Jetpack, enhance social sharing, and allow people to log in using WordPress, among other things. ?If the ability to use my blog as a reader hasn’t improved, please let me know.

Then another weird thing happened. ?Yahoo Finance finally decided to cleanse the shire, and tossed out what I felt were a number of subpar content providers. ?That’s when I noticed the replacement which was Yahoo Finance Contributors. ?I asked to be admitted, and I was happily waved in.

What I didn’t expect was that it would roughly double the readers coming to?my blog natively. ?Email and RSS are up also. ?I suspect that there will be some fall-off from these levels, but it is interesting to see this happen after 7.5 years of blogging and?a relatively stable audience over the last five years.

About the only change long time readers should see is a picture at the top of almost all of my pieces from now on, unless like this post, I am not sending it onto Yahoo Finance via my intermediary tumblr blog. ?Additional note: if you want to comment at my blog using DISQUS, it is operational on the tumblr site.

I don’t intend on changing anything else at this blog — not topics, style, etc. ?I remain happy to answer questions via blog posts, and I have a number of book reviews coming, but the one thing I don’t have any more of are long series of posts on a related topic. ?I think all of those are out of my system.

As I end many of these memorial posts, I thank you for spending time on my blog reading my musings. ?I hope you always find it valuable, but I realize there are seasons in life, so if you eventually find me not as useful, well, that’s normal for many. ?My topics change over time, usually in sync with the markets. ?Phrasing it another way, if you find me less useful, you might want to check back in when?market events change, because you might find me relevant again (or not).

One final note: if anyone knows a cartoonist that might like to work with me, let me know. ?No guarantee that I will do anything there, but I have been musing about a few ideas. ?Bye for now!

I received the following from a reader of mine:

Dear Sir:

Have you removed your weekly Twitter digests? They were fantastic reading – please bring them back if you can.

I’m a huge fan of your work.

Regards,

I’ve been really busy, and I haven’t been tweeting much. ?I regard my blog audience as my main audience, and so I want to ask my main audience one simple question. ?Do you value my “sorted weekly tweets” or not? ?You can email me, and I will consider the requests; the more that email me, the more likely I continue to do it.

Sincerely,

David