I just wanted to put out a friendly reminder that if you've been considering moving out of mutual funds and into exchange traded funds, now is the time to get moving. Between now and the end of next month is prime time to implement this strategy. Here is why, and also why you should at least stop investing in mutual funds for a while.

Funny, but I heard that lyric only yesterday, the day before the twenty year anniversary of, Black Monday, the 508 point drop in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Black Monday saw the Dow lose 22.6% of it's value in a single trading day.

I remember where I was, what I was doing and the shock I felt that day. I had little to my name at the time, but what I had was more money than I'd ever had before. Suddenly it was worth nearly a quarter less than it had been before the weekend.

You'd almost have to be living under a rock to have missed the news that Apple will be opening up their iPhone to third party developers. My first reaction to the news was that they were throwing in the towel, giving up, acknowledging there was no way to keep the hackers from prying their way in and providing the average consumer a way to get herself sideways with Apple just because she wanted a cool screen saver program.

But I think it goes deeper than that.

I spent a few minutes yesterday looking at how my various investments are doing relative to each other. Because I hadn't looked in on progress in a while I wanted to see whether any particular investment (or investments) had been doing better than others. If one or more individual securities do well - or one or more perform poorly - then it might be time to rebalance that portfolio.

It's a fairly easy process, especially if your broker provides a nice pie chart of your investments on your portfolio summary page like mine does. I just look to see if any of the pieces of pie are significantly larger or smaller than the average slice. If your broker doesn't show these pie charts, they're easy to construct with your favorite spreadsheet program. Just use your most recent brokerage statement and create a pie chart of your holdings.

For the most part my investments were not out of line this time around. The one exception was my 401(k), where all investment had performed equally well except one - the Emerging Markets fund. The slice representing Emerging Markets had grown to be about twice the size of all the others.

You probably know that I'm a big advocate of ETFs, also known as Exchange Traded Funds. You buy an ETF the same way you buy a stock. The difference between an ETF and a stock is that the ETF security itself is a share in any number of individual stocks or other securities. The combination of securities that make up the ETF security gives the ETF it's character. For instance, you can buy an ETF which represents the real estate market, or a basket of bonds or even the S&P500.

In that sense, ETFs are a lot like Mutual Funds. Unlike Mutual Funds however, ETFs are not actively managed. Once the basket of stocks is selected for an ETF, the management job has little to do with stock selection. As a result of not having active management, ETFs feature drastically lower management fees. And that's why I favor them for my investment portfolios.

I got a phone call yesterday from a representative of a local investment firm. The caller was not your average telemarketer. She was well spoken. Her delivery was unhurried and respectful. I could tell right away this wasn't your average boiler room operation. Now I don't normally give telemarketers any time at all, but because of the obvious differences between this caller and all the others, this one I decided to listen to.

The pitch was presented as something new and different. She told me her firm's strategies "fly in the face" of traditional investment strategies for superior risk adjusted performance.

I'm a firm believer in making sure every dollar I have is working full time on my behalf. Money sitting idle is a bad thing in my book. If it's not invested then it's depreciating.

You should adopt this philosophy. Make sure every last dollar you own has a job to do. You're the CEO of You, Inc. Your investments are your employees. As CEO it's your responsibility to organize your employees for maximum growth of your little enterprise. Here are six fundamental strategies you should use to ensure each and every dollar is invested in the most optimal way.

alt="StockScouter investment returns chart" title="StockScouter investment returns chart" >It's been a while since we had a look at our StockScouter investments. Let's check in on how our investments are doing.

As you may recall, we're tracking Jon Markman's 2nd half of 2007 StockScouter portfolio. His system selects 10 stocks from the universe of stocks based on their timeliness and appreciation potential. I've been blogging about the StockScouter system since the most recent selection was made, tracking it's progress through the market's ups and downs.

According to Jon Markman. The StockScouter stock selection system has never had a six month period where it underperformed the S&P500. With less than three months remaining, the StockScouter portfolio has some catching up to do. Four of the ten original picks are down 10% or more. A fifth, Pride International, is down 8.8%. The worst performing stock in the group has been Hiland Holdings GP. Hiland is down over 20% since our hypothetical investment was made in July.

Read much about personal finance and you'll find there is one question few agree on: How much to set aside as an emergency fund.

The idea for emergency funds is sound. The odds are good we'll all need access to money in a hurry at some point. Nearly everyone encounters a rough spot somewhere along the road in life. When we do we might need fast access to money to see our way through.

The problem with emergency funds is in funding them. You work hard, you save. You invest money in the stock market for the long term because that's where the real investment returns live. You don't want to have to sell stock to meet needs in time of emergency because of the taxes we'll have to pay on our gains.

Just the other day I wrote about the kinds of things I choose not to invest in. Here we are only a few days later and I have a nice follow up story to it.

Remember a few months ago I wrote and article about a fellow who builds bicycles as works of art? He wrote me a note yesterday to say how well one of his investments have paid off lately.

I liked your piece on things you wouldn't invest in. I think you should say shouldn't invest in. (emphasis added) My bike hobby paid off big time a couple of weeks ago. I sold an old but nicely restored track bike for almost 15 times what I put into it. ...