Investment

Ladies and gentlemen, may the best investor win. Sick of squabbling with one another as stocks tanked, some married couples have decided to draw a red line through their financial houses.

Magician David Copperfield made the Statue of Liberty disappear, but even he might be envious of the neat trick some mutual fund companies have recently accomplished: making poor-performing mutual funds – and their records – vanish.

Investors ended the year on high and sour notes

A year ago, with the markets and the economy in meltdown, the SmartMoney Power 30 was full of the usual cast of government giants and Wall Street heavyweights: Ben Bernanke, Timothy Geithner, Warren Buffett. But as the U.S. moves into a new phase, a time of slow but seemingly steady recovery, some of the biggest players might seem more on the fringe – academics, advisers, even a lobbyist.

If there’s one belief that took hold during the financial mess, it’s "All debt is bad." After all, too many companies borrowed too much money, and when the recession hit, they couldn’t pay back all that cash. Hundreds of firms saw their stock value plummet and filed for bankruptcy protection, and embittered investors lost billions.

Best-selling books, top colleges in the U.S., the safest cars. There’s no shortage of reviews and rankings to help with all manner of decisions. But when it comes to one of the biggest – how to choose among retirement investments – the most prominent raters and judges have been uncharacteristically silent.

It was only a matter of time. Before the crash, investors who wanted to buy more stocks jumped into exchange-traded funds at a record clip. Then bonds became the safe play, and ETFs with bond holdings jumped 61 percent this year, to $91 billion.

Every career has its share of days you never forget. There are the early memories, such as getting that first paycheck, and milestones like scoring the big promotion or the morning you finally moved into the corner office. But for many people, there’s one special day that stands head and shoulders above the rest: the last.

The stock market’s been climbing. Housing prices are on the rebound. But the job market? Like a bum on a bender, it still hasn’t hit bottom. Even as the Dow continued its impressive run-up in recent months, Americans were still losing jobs at the rate of 2,500 an hour.