People Make Business

It was Morningstar Inc.’s biggest conference ever, in terms of attendees and marquee names on stage. Some 1,600 individual investors, financial planners and money managers gathered in Chicago earlier this month to listen to the best and the brightest talk about the pressing financial issues of the day.

If you missed the conference, you can live without the details of the speeches, the occasional stock tip and the inner workings of various portfolio-management strategies.

What you can’t live without are the questions that arose through the various sessions, ones that individuals — hearing the tone and tenor of experts who are nervous about the direction of the market — should be asking themselves about their own portfolio and money-management style.

Here are the questions that, as the conference unfolded, I thought every investor should be asking themselves now. Take a look, and then answer the questions honestly for yourself.

1.

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The relationship between buyer and seller has evolved slowly over time. Many early societies relied on the barter system, which is a method of exchange where goods and services are swapped for each other. The introduction of a medium of exchange, like money, made buying and selling a lot easier. All the buyer had to worry about was the value of the goods he was interested in, not the value of the goods he was trading in. Things are a bit more complicated today.

Six out of every ten retail transactions today are completed with a credit or debit card. These plastic purchases can be quite costly for merchants that sell inexpensive items, since they are charged for each electronic sale. These merchants may conclude that cash-only is the only way to go. Unfortunately, this means that they have to turn away customers that do not carry cash. The simplest and most affordable solution to this problem is an ATM.

Also known an automatic teller machine, ATMs have been around for decades.

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