OptionsHouse is offering 100 commission free trades for new accounts with promotion code FREE100. You must deposit at least $3,000 within 45 days and the 100 free trades expire after 60 days of funding. This offer expires December 31st, 2009.

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When peer to peer lending first started, the biggest name in the market was Prosper. I was skeptical about the whole business of peer to peer lending and it showed in my review of Prosper, which was more about peer to peer lending than it was about Prosper itself. Since then, with the arrival of SEC oversight and other competing businesses like Lending Club, I have a little more faith in peer to peer lending networks.

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There are two mistakes that most people routinely make. They let emotions play too big a role in their decision making and they fail to adequately plan for the worst case scenario before the worst case scenario actually happens. These two mistakes aren’t a big deal when you’re planning dinner, but they can be disastrous when it comes to investing in the stock market. Reacting emotionally to the market can lead to bad decisions, which is compounded by the fact that we react to worst case scenarios rather than plan for them!

Fortunately in investing, we can use some of the tools to protect ourselves against it. I’ve recently been reading more about it and one of the best ideas I’ve seen is the use of stop loss orders and trailing stop loss orders to your advantage.

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There’s been a lot of talk in the last year about the US dollar being replaced as a reserve currency, in part because of all the bailouts and “quantitative easing” done to jump-start our economy. With all the recent economic forums, such as the G20 in Pittsburgh, it’s no surprise that this has been a topic of conversation.

So, we started looking at ways to diversify ourselves off the US dollar. It’s possible that the dollar could be replaced as a reserve currency but more importantly, we realized that in the increasingly global economy, it’s dangerous to have all your money be from one country. There’s a reason why gold spiked to over $1,000 an ounce and it’s because people wanted stability.

However, if you don’t want to own gold, are there other options? I think a foreign exchange currency CD might be a good idea. Before we make any decisions, we should do some research about them in the first place. I’m going to use Everbank as an example because I already have a banking relationship with them and their website offers up a lot of good information about their products. For our review I’ll use the MarketSafe BRIC Certificate of Deposit as the example.

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One of the newest sites I’ve been reading has been The Daily Crux, a site that highlights, among other things, the most intriguing investing news of the day. It’s run by Stansberry & Associates Investment Research, a company that does exactly what it sounds like it does – investment research (and they’re based out of nearby Baltimore).

Investing isn’t my forte, I’m an adherent to simple investing through index funds with a little dabbling in individual stocks just to get my heart rate up during the day. However, I find that even if you aren’t big into the markets, it’s still especially important to keep abreast of the financial news of the day.

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If you own an index fund and you’re paying an expense ratio greater than 0.35%, you’re getting ripped off. I created a list of index funds from major brokers, like Vanguard, Fidelity, and Schwab, looked up their expense ratios on Google Finance, and then listed them in the order from cheapest to most expensive.

None of the funds on the list have a sales load of any kind and I was surprised to find a fund as cheap as 0.09%. I was even more surprised to find index funds that charged over 1%. Check out State Farm S&P 500 Index B – it has a 1.49% expense ratio and a 5% deferred load! (a deferred load is a fee that is charged when you sell an asset) It has $425M in total assets too and each one of their customers is getting ripped off.

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TradeKing has once again revived it’s $50 new account promotion bonus for the month of November. From October 1st through November 30th, open an account, deposit $2,500, and make one trade – then you’ll be give the $50 account bonus. These are the same requirements as last time and the same as TradeKing’s National Friends Day promotion (minus the email referrals).

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This is a guest post written by Mark Wolfinger of the investing blog Options for Rookies. Mark grew up in Brooklyn and in an earlier life, earned a PhD (chemistry) from Northwestern. After several years as a research chemist, in Dec 1976 he moved to Chicago to trade options. Over the next 23 years, he was primarily a CBOE market maker, but also worked as a risk manager, and coached new traders. He left the CBOE in 2000 and began a career as an educator. He’s published three books and numerous magazine articles.

Mark recently authored The Rookie’s Guide to Options and he approached me with a novel guest post idea. You don’t normally associate options with passive investing but he is going to explain how you can use options, specifically collars, to protect yourself when passive investing.

Let’s begin by agreeing:

• a) Passive investing beats active investing – for all but the few talented traders who consistently outperform the markets. Let’s also agree that none of us is a member of that elite group.
• b) The rules: allocate assets, diversify, buy and hold, don’t panic by selling into market declines etc. These are the most commonly used methods to minimize investment risk. They are constantly repeated by journalists, bloggers, brokers, financial planners and financial advisors.

Should most of us follow this advice with confidence? Do we save a portion of each paycheck, invest passively, and confidently accept whatever happens?

I vote ‘no.’

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TradeMONSTER is a relatively new online discount broker in an industry that hasn’t seen a new entrant in a few years. I believe TradeMonster’s strategy is to offer relatively low pricing (not rock bottom) and a powerful suite of browser-based analysis tools. TradeMonster is owned by optionMonster, a financial media company that publishes market news and commentary on options and stock trading. If you’ve ever watched CNBC then you’ll recognize a bunch of the faces behind optionMonster (Jon ‘DRJ’ Najarian and Guy Adami are on Fast Money).

The aspect of TradeMonster that really jumped out at me is the first thing I’m going to review – paper trading.

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Email Newsletter subscribers will already know this (you should sign up if you haven’t already, you get a couple free eBooks!) but Lending Club is running a promotion this September where you could win $2,500 if you are Lending Club’s 250,000th subscriber.

Click here to sign up and if you are the 250,000th registered investor, you win $2,500. You don’t have to invest a thing, you just need to become a registered investor.

If you do invest, the average return over the last twelve months has been 9.6% APY, which is a pretty nice return. Can’t beat that with the stock market over the same period of time! I’m personally not an investor because I can’t be, Maryland residents can’t invest through Lending Club, but I probably would’ve given it a try if I were allowed to. So it goes sometimes.

Contest ends when September ends, be sure to review the contest terms & conditions to confirm your eligibility. Good luck!