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This article describes how to invest for the best long-term results. It applies to all investors but the primary audience is individuals who expect to derive substantial retirement income from their investment portfolio.

• The focus is to generate the highest returns over an investor's lifetime (or longer if you plan to leave money to your estate). The way to do this is to take advantage of the "portfolio effect" of Modern Portfolio Theory ... wide diversification increases returns and decreases volatility.
  
  
• The typical investor gives up as much as 50% of their investment returns in costshttp://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/blog/1362.htm

  South Amboy, New Jersey, is a waterfront industrial town on a remote promontory behind Staten Island, jutting into lower New York Bay. It's across the Raritan River from historically important Perth Amboy, but it's fair to say that few people ever heard of South Amboy until sunset on May 18, 1950, when they suddenly heard a lot. An entire freight train, five lighters, and a railroad pier suddenly exploded and disappeared. About twenty-five people were never seen again; the largest piece of metal from the explosion was only about a foot in length. A significant part of the town was leveled, steeples were knocked off churches, and windows were broken in five surrounding counties. Considering what caused it, it seems remarkable that so few people were killed. The explanation usually given is that the explosion blew straight up and straight down; the distant windows were smashed by pressure implosion.

  When Pakistan split off from the rest of India, there were blhttp://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/blog/1482.htm

  Robert Morris

  Charles Peterson developed the idea but was unsuccessful in popularizing it, that Spruce Street in central Philadelphia might be regarded as an architectural museum. It stretches from river to river, but has no bridge or ferry landing at either end, so traffic is less. The house near the Delaware River was built in 1702, with each house just a little older as you progress toward Broad (14th) Street where houses were built around 1880, and then on into the early Twentieth Century as you cross Broad Street and go toward the Schuyylkill. For a century or more Spruce Street was the place where doctors had their offices, much like Harley Street in London, which it somewhat resembles. A numbehttp://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/blog/1087.htm

  Since the nation was only formed in 1776, and the only memorable war before that was the French and Indian War of 1754, the origin in 1747 of the Pennsylvania 28th Division of Infantry needs a little explaining. The 28th is a National Guard reserve unit, taking its present organizational form 138 years ago. Even counting from that moment makes it the oldest (and third largest) division in the Army, but there are another 123 years of history before that.

  A few people remember that Ben Franklin made his first step into politics during King George's War, when French and Spanish privateers were suddenly roaming Delawhttp://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/blog/1386.htm

  There are now many more authors than there are publishers of books. A strong force driving this disparity is that just about every school child owns and uses a home computer, but commercial printing presses have difficulty accepting copy from that source, especially photographs. The inherent mismatch may have something to do with commercial printing presses switching from Gutenberg's movable type to printing page images at least a generation or so ago, while computer printers took the direction of perfecting the Gutenberg method rather than replacing it. Let's give a simplified explanation.

  Very few commercial printers do physical type-setting anymore. Since 1993 when Adobe invented the method, they generally work from what amounts to a photograph of ehttp://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/blog/1363.htm

  First, take a look at what you are trying to achieve, and a handy example would be

  Yahoo

  http://www.yahoo.com/. You will see it is not a daily or a weekly, it is continuous. The page of the newspaper is a montage of ten or twelve blocks on a page. For example, one block might give you the month's schedule, another shows the sports scores, another shows the stock market, etc. Each one of those blocks is probably updated at a different time, making this a continuous newsletter, and of course there is a way provided to individualize the blocks of space, change the color schemes, etc. Since this newsletter is on the Internet, anyone can read it from anywhere ihttp://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/blog/914.htm

  Most Americans would like to lose weight, particularly if they could eat, and eat some more, while they did it. Dick Watson recently told the Right Angle Club about an adventure cruise on a sailing ship in the South Pacific, where he and everyone else ate huge mounds of delicious food, but still lost 12 pounds in a month. About twenty of these voyagers spent eight thousand dollars for the privilege of working as sailors for a month on an authentic pre-steam brigantine, sailing from Aukland to Easter Island. Dick took fourteen hundred beautiful photos of the experience, but most of his audience sat transfixed at the description of the horrors of sailor life. Not your average luxury cruise.

  Moshulu

  Ahttp://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/blog/1323.htm

  Doylestown, PA

  At the time when Philadelphia and New York were both occupied by the British during the Revolutionary War, a backwoods highway connected the thirteen colonies. Doylestown is 35 miles due north of Philadelphia City Hall, at the point of intersection of this variant of the Ho Chi Minh Trail with the path which Philadelphia Tories took in their flight to Kingston, Ontario. No doubt there were some interesting conversations in Mr. Doyle'http://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/blog/1295.htm

  Duke of York

  William Penn, who spent considerable time in British prisons, established a penal code for his new colony which largely swept away the draconian punishments established by the code of the Duke of York. Until as late as 1780, jails were mainly confinement hotels for debtors, prisoners awaiting trial, and witnesses. For actual punishment, the methods were execution and flogging. Penn's Code for Pennsylhttp://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/blog/1263.htm

  Haym Salomon

  The word Sephardi is derived from the Hebrew word for Spain, where Jews were a prominent part of the Arab community for several hundred years. The Christian monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella, regarding the Sephardim as pro-arab, drove them out of Spain and Portugal in 1492. They scattered widely, and only a small portion eventually got to the Western hemisphere.It is also helpful to know that Askenazic is the Hehttp://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/blog/1151.htm

  Donald Rumfeld

  At the moment, the coherence of the motives of Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, and the retired military officers who now unite in denouncing him can only be dimly imagined. At best, we can expect future revelations to tell us how close we came to the truth. But let's take a stab at it.

  http://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/blog/819.htm As commonly stated in medical history circles, the history of the Pennsylvania Hospital is the history of American medicine. The beautiful old original building, with additions attached, still stands where it did in 1755, a great credit to Samuel Rhoads the builder and designer of it. The colonial building on Pine Street stopped housing 150 patients around 1980, supposedly at the demand of the Fire Marshall, although its perpetual fire insurance policy still owes the hospital several thousand dollars a year as unspent premium dividend. There may have been one small fire during two centuries of use, but its true fire hazard would be difficult to assert. It was just out of date. The original patient areas consisted of long open wards, with forty or so beds lined up behind fluted columns, in four sections on two floors. The pharmacy was on the first floor, the lunatics in the basement, and the operating rooms on the third floor under a domed skylight. It was entirely http://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/blog/1432.htm Yale When a college applicant recently asked me what was so good about Yale, the question was so unexpected it took a moment to find a graceful answer. What finally occurred to me was the battle cry of New Orleans, before Hurricane Katrina. "It is impossible to find a bad meal in New Orleans." In culinary matters, New Orleans had a deep bench; with everybody in the city interested in good cooking, even the most dilapidated diner would serve you something rather good. Well, in 1940 at least, it was impossible to take a course in Yale College that wasn't stimulating, taught by a distinguished professor who was charming and likable. At one point, I wandered intohttp://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/blog/821.htm It's getting to be time for the country to tell the education industry what is expected of it. Dr. Fisher Secondary schools strive to be known for their well-rounded excellence. That's pretty hard to measure, so http://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/blog/850.htm Yale Divinity School Until fairly recently, academic institutions have existed as an outgrowth of religion, sort of enlarged monasteries charged with acting in loco parentis. The Catholic Church in Europe had its medieval universities, but could probably have got along without them. It was Protestantism, especially American Protestantism, which needed a place to train ministers. Harvard, William and Mary, Yale, Princeton and the other early American colleges were established to train ministers. If there was room, they sometimes took students with no intentiohttp://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/blog/729.htm The Latin phrase Quis custodies custodies warns that it's pretty hard to find anyone you can completely trust. Investing for your retirement, you must be careful to avoid transaction fees to pay your agents, and taxes to pay your government to watch your agents, who in turn watch the companies they invest in. The Pitcairn Financial Group information is available at http://www.pitcairn.com Gradually, the world is coming to accept John Bogle's idea of a market index fund as the best most people can do. Investing in the whole market, it doesn't do much trading, whether buying or selling. Therefore, it has minimum costhttp://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/blog/455.htm The early city of Philadelphia was too tightly compressed and thus generated slums. By contrast, areas today become slums by being abandoned. Is there a middle way between these extremes that doesn't produce slums? eltreths alley Almost up to the time the national capital moved away to the District of Columbia, the town of Philadelphia was compressed into an area of about a half square mile. Although there was a whole empty continent stretching to the Pacific Ocean on which to build houses, early Philadelphia built row houses and dark little alleys, and packhttp://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/blog/776.htm If lowering taxes is inflationary, how can it be that several financial columnists refer to buying low priced china Man Chinese imports as "importing deflation"? It would seem, in both cases, that consumers end up with more money in their pockets, so both cases must be inflationary. To answer that twister, you also need to consider where the inflationary new money comes from. http://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/blog/847.htm Composers and performing artists are both musicians, but belong to different unions, different styles of life, and different payment systems. Composers typically sell their work to publishers of sheet music, to orchestras, to producers of plays and movies, or anyone else who commissions them to write music. About 1914, they decided that wasn't fair, because it pays the same for flops and successes. Somehow, the successful composition should bring greater reward than one that fails. So, ASCAP, the Association of Composers and Publishers was formed, to collect royalties for the composers when their pieces are played. After ninety years of adjusting, their system has become fiendishly clever. http://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/blog/490.htm Charles Wilson Peale (1741-1827) The Artist in His Museum 1822, Oil on canvas (The Joseph Harrison Jr. Collection) Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. all of the red brick buildings on Independence Square look as though they were part of Independence Hall, but there is one exception. The building facing Fifth Street is Philosophical Hall, one of the four buildings of the American Philosophical Society. Right now, Philosophical Hall is used as a museum. It could be called the first museum in Amerhttp://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/blog/489.htm Art Museum There are a number of residential relics along the Parkway, but in general the idea seems to have been to put governmental buildings there, in a sort of French-like celebration of governmental glory. There is the Youth Study Center, the Department of Education administration building, the Boy Scouts of America, the Cathedral of St. Peter and St. Paul, and of course the tower of City Hall at one end and the Parthenon-like Art Museum at the other. But this is Philadelphia, and certain small touches of the tohttp://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/blog/902.htm George Washington had been trained as a surveyor, created a rather handsome house in Mt. Vernon, Thomas Ustick Walter and had the new capital city, both located near his home and named after him. It is clear that ideas for the design of the new city and its major public buildings were brought to him for approval, and very likely adjusted themselves to his stated preferences. In the dedication ceremony, just about every political figure, dressed in Masonic costume, was lined up in two lines, which parted to allow Washington in full Masonic regalia to march majestically forward to lay the cornerstone with proper Masonic rites. Let there never be any doubt that it whttp://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/blog/1179.htm City Hall The central keel of the city, Market Street, must be considered in three quite different sections, East and West of City Hall, and West of the Schuylkill River. The street was once called High Street , and the name was slow to change. It will be enough for now to consider only the oldest section of fourteen blocks from City Hall to the Delaware River,which is almost a lesson in archeology. Start at Victorian City Hall and face East to Penn's landing on the Delaware. William Penn had laid out the city plan as a cross, with Market and Broad http://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/blog/869.htm Having eight grandchildren provides reminder that June is a time for graduations. So last week I returned from one in Virginia on a very full train, early in the morning, somewhat sleep deprived. High prices of gasoline had forced people onto trains who would otherwise have taken an airplane or driven a car, so the conductors were unusually hassled to service tickets between stops, and were rather brusque. It's likely I was the only passenger wearing a jacket and tie. The conductor in my car came by with terse orders to sign the tickets, perhaps unnecessarily brisk about it. We only exchanged brief maneuvers, long enough for me to see that this representative of corporate authority was wearing, well, dreadlocks. Both of us were wearing symbols. As we passed Wilmington, Delaware, I fell asleep. The next I knew, I woke up looking out the window at 30th Street Station, realizing with horror the train was already moving forward. Jumping to my feet, I encohttp://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/blog/1472.htm Rittenhouse Sq. The Rittenhouse Square "area" has far outgrown the square itself, and the term when used by locals usually refers to the whole area of central Philadelphia West of Broad Street to the Schuylkill, bounded roughly by Chestnut Street on the North, and Pine Street on the South. Rittenhouse Square Park is in the center of this primarily residential area, and is now mostly ringed by apartment buildings. Rittenhouse Park was once enclosed bhttp://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/blog/1086.htm T. Roosevelt Republican Presidential Convention of 1900 was held across the street from what is now Children's Hospital at 34th and Spruce Streets. Although the re-nomination of an incumbent President (McKinley) is always a boring, foregone conclusion, the Vice-Presidential nomination in this case was a hilarious circus. Boss Platt of New York hated Governor Teddy Roosevelt,and wanted him out http://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/blog/1029.htm Alps The "Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838-1839" raised strong feelings against slavery, particularly in Frances Anne Kemble's native England. At the outset of her book, Fanny Kemble describes what it was like to travel on American railroads in 1838. On Friday morning December 21, 1838, we started from Philadelphia, by railroad, for Baltimore. It is a curious fact enough, that half the routes that are traveled in America are either temporary or unfinished -- one reason, among several, for the multitudinous accidents which befall wayfarers.At the very outset of our journey, and within scarce a mile ofhttp://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/blog/934.htm Lake Clarke By 1750, or roughly ninety years after King Charles gave them their charter extending infinitely to the Pacific Ocean, the Connecticut Yankees with Old Testament first names had found their promised land was as disappointing as the King who promised it to them. So, two kings later, an exploratory party was sent west of the Hudson. The party returned with glowing tales of the Wyoming Valley in Northeastern Pennsylvania, just over the Blue Ridge Mountain. Only one white man had ever been there before them, Count Zinzendorf, the adventurous founder of the http://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/blog/1107.htm Dr. Witherspoon The most eminent Scotsman in Colonial America was the Reverend Dr. Witherspoon, an eminent Presbyterian minister and President of the College of New Jersey, later Princeton University. Already at the top of the academic heap in Scotland, he was recruited for Princeton on the advice of Benjamin Franklin, who knew his political sentiments well. From England, Witherspoon made the following exhortation to his future compatriots at the critical moment of the Declaration ofhttp://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/blog/1149.htm Commodore Matthew Perry There may have been earlier contacts, but the strong relationship between Philadelphia and Japan seems to trace mainly to the 1876 Centennial Exhibition here, when the awakening Japanese decided to introduce themselves to Western peoples. Japan closed itself off from the rest of the world in 1600, and Matthew Perry opened them up in 1854 by shocking them with a display of how far Western culturehttp://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/blog/981.htm Tom Monteverde We must be grateful to the distinguished litigator, "Tom Monteverde, for bringing up the topic of the importance of the jury in American history. Juries seldom realize how much power they can have if they unite on a common purpose. In fact, juries have the implicit right to veto almost anything the rest of government does, by rendering it unenforceable. http://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/blog/1060.htm In 1747, Benjamin Franklin had a life-transforming experience, acting quite unlike his character before, or later. At that time, Old Europe was engaged in some distant tribal skirmishing which has come to be known as King George's War. King George II, that is, under whose rule Franklin in 1751 inscribed on the cornerstone of the Pennsylvania Hospital that Pennsylvania was flourishing, "for he sought the happiness of his people." The cornerstone of the Pennsylvania Hospital inscribed by Franklin. Those distant commotions suddenly developed a harsh reality for the little pacifist sanctuaries on the Delaware River, when French and http://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/blog/480.htm Retirement is a modern concept. As recently as 1900 there was no such thing as retirement. Average life expectancy was around 47 and people essentially worked until they died. Life expectancy at birth Life expectancy today is nearly double that and spending 20 or 30 years out of the workforce in retirement is quite common. Life expectancy ahttp://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/blog/1373.htm Pictures I Pictures II Pictures III Pictures IV Pictures V http://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/blog/1406.htm