Four Mutual Funds to Get Your Kid Up and Running as an Investor
It could be the start of something big.
Want to help a high school or college graduate begin building a nest egg? Looking to get your child or grandchild started as an investor? Your best bet is a no-load mutual fund, because the kid will get broad diversification without paying a hefty commission.

The broad U.S. stock market is up almost 6 percent this year, but as always, the details tell a more interesting story. Investors who loaded up on energy stocks revealed in the group’s 18 percent gain, while health care investors suffered a 4 percent loss. Here’s a look at the year’s winners and losers so far and Smart Money’s outlook for the rest of 2006.

HOT
Industrial Metals Fueled by insatiable worldwide demand, steel-company stocks are up 76 percent. Three of the 10 best performing S&P 500 stocks are steelmakers. Firms that deal in other hard commodities such as nickel, zinc and copper are up an average of 26 percent.

Huge Resurgence in Demand for My “Ratemaking for Operating Employees” course.

I have been teaching many, many of my “How a Utility Makes Money” courses, which I call “Ratemaking” courses. I have received rave reviews for my Ratemaking content and my teaching style. Very few of you have had this course. There is a huge resurgence in need for this course in utilities today.

Lucian’s Consulting Successes

I recently completed two consulting jobs. Lucian’s Consulting Project Success # 1 On the first consulting job I created over $50 million dollars in extra shareholder wealth for my client company. Because of confidentiality agreements, I can reveal only the nature of the consulting activities. Simply stated, I developed and installed a new financial evaluation process for authorization and implementation of capital projects.

Question: Is the Utility “Merger Mania” Over?

Answer: No, the merger of utilities will continue until there are only 6 or 7 big utilities in the United States. This will take 15 more years. The Duke/Cinergy merger will result in a 75 billion dollar (based on total assets) company, largest in the utility business. In about 5 years we will see several more of these 75 billion dollar mergers.

Question: I heard you speak at a national convention speech a while back. You spoke about utilities being “siloed.”

Answer: In the speech you are referring to, my reference was to Nuclear groups and other being so siloed that they have omitted, almost totally, one of the main ingredients of proper decision making. The ingredient omitted is the “financial ingredient.” The financial part of the decision is often included in a cursory fashion by well intentioned, but financially uninformed, engineers or scientists. This is particulary true, in my judgement, in nuclear plants. The finance guy is a nuclear group is most often siloed out of many decision processes. He is often an employee lacking in authority and is given little time attention or respect when it comes to decision time. And those decisions make without his considered input are weak or tainted decision that lead to sub-optimization or even losses.

Lucian’s and ABC Sales Pitch to Sleepy Executive

I was hired to go with one of the Top 4 management consulting firms in the world to sell an information system outsourcing contract to a Fortune 500 Energy Company with 25 billion dollars of assets. I will refer to this company as ABC. ABC was selling to a big utility and knew little about utilities at the time. At that time they had never had a fortune 500 utility as a customer. They had a problem and they knew it. ABC did not have an utility finance experts on staff. Therefore, they hired me as the world’s leading expert on these topics. They wanted me to go with them to cover their base on these topics during the sales pitch.