Benjamin Franklin once said that “In this world nothing is certain but death and taxes.”, but if he were to be alive today, I think he might have said, “death, taxes and capitalism.” I must admit that this seems to be a bit of a morbid subject, but the fact that money is made from the death of others is nothing new.

Today, death and capitalism are inseparable –from florists to overpriced caskets builders, cemetery owners, and the services of a funeral home are just a small part of the death market. There are even occupations and careers surrounding death. Tombstone craftsmen, hearse drivers, grave diggers, embalmers, morticians, coroners, and even biohazard specialists whose job is something you may not want to ponder for too long. It is a business that will never run out of clients, dead or alive.

Adding to the list of death profiteers are brokers and investors that trade in life settlements of the terminally ill. These life settlements or viaticals as they are known, are the life insurance policies of the terminally ill that are bought at a discount. The viator, receives much needed funds upfront to presumably pay for their medical expenses. In exchange, an investor in viaticals will receive the full face value amount of the insurance policy when the sick person dies.
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Kids, cover your eyes and ears because this is only for mature adults 18 and over. Well, at least for grown-ups that are accredited with a high net worth. It was bound to happen sooner or later in this 57 billion dollar industry. Adultvest.com is a website that caters to investors interested in capitalizing in the adult entertainment through hedge funds, private equity funds and venture capital.

“AdultVest is the first and only Investment Marketplace and News Letter geared towards matching investors and successful entrepreneurs with growing adult companies and adult entertainers looking to start up, expand, acquire or be acquired.”

Billed as the first company of its kind, Adultvest was founded and is headed by CEO Francis Koenig, an experienced hedge fund veteran. The company’s management team reads like a list of who’s who in business management, investing, finance, private equity, banking, real estate and of course adult entertainment – just to name a few.
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Do you have some extra cash sitting around doing nothing or just earning minimal interests in you bank account? Why not lend it out to borrowers and earn some decent interest rates? LendingClub.com appears to be a new company that is modeling after Prosper.com’s P2P loan business. The average lender is averaging 12.23% per annum, while top lenders are making a healthy 17.53%.

This return on investment beats most banks and savings accounts by a big margin. Not only are you making a good return, you are helping out people who need access to funds at a lower rate than they can get at a traditional financial institution. It is a win-win-win situation for you the lender, the borrower and Lending Club.

The whole idea works much the same way as Prosper.com. A borrower submits a loan request, Lending Club matches the loans with lenders or lenders can choose the loans to service, and then the funds are sent to the borrower. The loan is then repaid back to the lender over time, and can be direct deposited.
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Learning to trade in the Forex currency market can be a daunting task for investors wanting to diversify their stock portfolio to hedge against the weak US dollar. The Forex exchange may appear a bit too “foreign” to stock investors who are only familiar with trading on the stock markets. There is a better option in which an investor will not have to open a Forex broker account or change trading platforms just to add currencies to their investment basket.

Thanks to Rydex Investments, investors can now trade and own currencies using Rydex’s currencySHARESSM Trusts. They currently have 8 different currencies corresponding to 8 different currencySHARES^SM Trusts. An investor has the opportunity to trade the currencies of the Australian Dollar (FXA), British Pound Sterling (FXB), Canadian Dollar (FXC), Euro (FXE), Japanese Yen (FXY), Mexican Peso (FXM), Swedish Krona (FXS) or Swiss Franc (FXF).
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Are you having a difficult time finding a Forex signal provider to automate your currency trading? Maybe the ones you have found are a little bit too expensive for the service. Fret no more, because Zulutrade gives you a choice from numerous signal providers at no cost.

“Zulutrade receives rebates from the brokers, for the trades generated and splits them with the experts that provide the advice.”

Thousands of buy/sell recommendations are received by Zulutrade each day from some of the most popular signal providers. There are also professional and talented traders from around the world that can be tracked. You can choose from their individual performance and then the signal is automatically sent to your broker account to trade with.
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Happy Holidays! And no, I’m not talking about TREX the stock ticker, but T-Rex of the Jurassic kind. If you are having a hard time finding that perfect gift for the paleontologist or fossil collector that is on your Christmas list, you should swing by Paleodirect.com and browse around. You will receive many thanks and accolades for years to come from your fortunate gift recipient.

As an investment, high quality rare fossils do not depreciate –unless you break it. Fossil collecting is one of the most undervalued markets in the field of rare collectibles. With international demand growing, deposits being depleted and new laws imposed on the trade of rare fossils; the price of the finest and rarest specimens will appreciate year after year.

High quality animal and plant fossils and pre-historic artifacts are much sought after by collectors from around the world. They have good reasons. Rare fossils are a finite commodity. While Mother Nature can still churn out other collectibles like precious stones, there are no more dinosaurs or pre-historic fauna to fossilize.
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Founded in June 2005, Trademaster has offices in both London and Dubai to offer investors managed Forex investing. Even though they are a fairly new company, they have had a strong trading record. Since its inception, the live Broadcast Account with the Velocity4x broker has shown a 37.43% cumulative return as of September 2007. Triple digit gains were realized with the using IFX Broker as of March 2007.

While the performance data found on the site is a bit outdated, Trademaster prides itself as a company that protects the client’s investment and offering transparency. So once you become a client, you will have online access to view their trading strategies and performance in real time. Below is more information as gathered from their website.
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The Banking sector has taken a beating this year because of the subprime mortgage fiasco. More share price decline is to come as bigger banks continue to write off billions of losses from bad mortgages. Smaller public community banks that do not even have subprime mortgages on their books are being punished as well.

The market is sometime quite “irrational” when it makes no distinction in pummeling a good stock from a deservingly bad one because of guilt by association. If history repeats itself, now would be a good time to pick up cheap shares in these smaller banks to see double to triple digit returns in the next two to four years. Similar situations have happened at least three times in the Banking sector as small banks were dragged down because of issues with bigger banks and an irrational market sentiment.

By owning an index of small community banks during the 1980s, between September 1982 and July 1986, an investor could have made over 250% returns. This same index of small banks would have made over 188% between November 1990 and October 1993. Another scenario appeared during 2000 when small banks were punished because of losses by big banks during a difficult rate environment. Over the next four years, the share price of the smaller banks skyrocketed once the market realized its errors with the smaller banks.
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