Jim Cramer picks underpeformed the market for the two years leading up to August 2007. In 6 months, he called buys on 3,458 stocks. There's no doubt Cramer was a successful hedge fund manager. My guess is that his tv persona has overtaken his brain.

Quoted: It's those stock picks that caught our attention. Cramer, by all accounts, had a stellar career as a hedge-fund manager. And he is held out by CNBC as the guy who can help viewers make big money. But a comprehensive and careful review of his stock picks by Barron's finds that his picks haven't beaten the market. Over the past two years, viewers holding Cramer's stocks would be up 12% while the Dow rose 22% and the S&P 500 16%, according to a record of 1,300 of the CNBC star's Buy recommendations compiled by YourMoneyWatch.com, a Website run by a retired stock analyst and loyal Cramer-watcher.

Ben Stein is working with the National Retirement Planning Coalition and has created a series of videos on planning for retirement. Nice of him considering that I doubt he would have any financial issues...

Barron's has the same investment thesis for EMC that I do, namely that you're getting the VMWare shares at a large discount to the IPO (Barron's estimates it at about 40% discount). Tis is why I picked up shares in EMC the day afetr VMWare's IPO last week.

Quoted: NEW YORK, Aug 19 (Reuters) - Shares of EMC Corp. <EMC.N>, the No. 1 maker of corporate data storage gear, could rise 20 percent or more over the next 12 months, according to a report in the Aug. 20 edition of Barron's. EMC, is the

Determine your own FU point. The point at which your investments exceed your living expenses.

(it appears that the very useful Google Spreadsheet is not currently available - hope it comes back up later).

An exploration of what is required to reach your own personal crossover point.

Quoted: The crossover point is the point at which your investments begin to earn more money than the cost of your living expenses. The crossover point is usually reached by keeping your living expenses lower than your income and investing that amount for the long term.

Pat Dorsey, director of stock analysis for Morningstar. Corporate Executive Board (EXBD). Negative working Capital. Converts 30% of revenue to free cash flow. Pays out 60% of cash flow in a dividend (about 2.5% yield). Growing at 30% a year with durable competitive advantage.

A great and detailed interview with legendary investor Bill Miller.

Famed money manager Bill Miller runs this fund. It's performance is pretty wild but it's still open to new investors unlike the Value Trust which beat the S&P for a dozen years.

Morningstar, the shining beacon of investment research, has just started computer "investor returns" in addition to "total returns."

Quoted: Back in October, Morningstar began calculating investor returns for all the mutual funds in our database, alongside the more familiar total returns. What's the difference? A fund's total return tells you how much its portfolio increased or decreased in value over a given period, but its investor return takes inflows and outflows into account to approximate the returns earned by a typical investor. Total return assumes a buy-and-hold strategy, whereas investor return recognizes that investors often buy high and sell low.