Your 401K or Other Investments: How much should you keep in cash?

Brett Arends gives us a nicely written reminder that needs continual repetition:

...your long-term investment returns will overwhelmingly depend ... upon just two things: asset allocation - how you spread your money between investments like stocks and bonds - and the value of those investments when you buy them.

He then reviews the evidence behind this assertion and gives some hints about how to make those two factors work in your favor.

When the markets look really bad, should you go entirely into cash? For example, think of the financial crisis of 2007-2008. How much should you keep in cash during such tough times?

Maybe more than you think.

Even during bad times, Arends suggests, 40% cash was about the most bearish a long-term investor would want to be.

Access article from here.

Cloud Services Like BittorrentSync Do Not Play Well With TrueCrypt: Experiments

Imagine yourself preparing for a business trip on which you will need a large number of sensitive files when you arrive at your destination. Being a sensible person, you're not comfortable having unencrypted sensitive files on your laptop, so you store the files in a large TrueCrypt container with state-of-the-art encryption.

When you open your laptop to use the sensitive files at your destination, you find that all the needed files are missing – none of them were properly synchronized to the laptop. Worse yet, you get home and find out that all the files created for the trip on your home desktop had been permanently destroyed!

Road warrior, you are screwed!

I very narrowly avoided having that happen to me during preparations for an upcoming trip. This post will alert you to things I learned that might help you avoid having such things happen to you. I discuss:

1. Encryption tools
2. Synchronization tools and issues
3. Major problems with existing synchronization tools – BitTorrentSync-Beta and other cloud services

Encryption Tools

There are dozens of ways to effectively protect sensitive files on computers that you use at home or