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There is a lot to know about investing. It all depends on
what type of investing you are interested in as well. There
are many different types of investment options out there. So
what is investing, specifically?

When you invest, you are paying in a certain amount of
money
that you expect to grow with time. Most investments are
considered long term investments meaning you will not get
your money back right away but if you leave your money in,
it can multiply dramatically over time. Types of Investing:
Real Estate Investing, Bonds, Stock Investing, Mutual
Funds,
401K. With stock investing, many of the younger investors
see the market as a way to get rich quick. They are quick
to sell off the stock that they have when it goes up or if
they see it go down a little, they get nervous and sell it
off. If they hold the investment and ride it out, they are
much more likely to see it grow.

If you are going to be investing, the key to success is
asset allocation. You need to vary your assets by
investing in more than one type. So just how do you do this
exactly? Well, you need to know what the 4 major types are
first.

(1) U.S. Stocks are one. They are represented by the S&P
500
Index (2) Foreign Stocks is another; represented by EAFE
Index (Europe, Australia and Far East) (3) Real estate,
represented by the National Association of Real Estate
Investment Trusts Equity Index (4)
Commodities;represented
by the Goldman Sachs.

The key to a growing portfolio is finding a balance
between the ups and downs of these many assets. For
example, if one year stocks seem to be down, real estate or
commodities may be up. So if you are ready to get started
with investing, what do you need to know? First, you need to
decide how much money you have to invest safely.

If you decide to invest in mutual funds, you will be asked
if you want a high, medium or low risk stock. If you invest
in high, there is of course, more risk involved but if it is
successful, you will see much higher returns. If you go with
a low risk, you will not lose as much if it doesn’t work
out but you will not gain large amounts if it is successful.
It’s really all about how much money you have and how
much
you feel comfortable with risking.

Whatever you choose, there is really no reason not to
invest. There are so many opportunities that can be tried
with little investment and little risk of loss. If you are
considering it,it is easy to learn a little more about it to
form your decisions of which way to go and then invest your
money and watch it grow! The money you invest may return
money for your college, kid’s college, retirement, to buy a
house or whatever your needs are. There’s no reason not to
get started today.

The author has discovered that wealthy people have a
different thought process around money and finances. She
has been helping people to achieve their financial goals for
over 10 years.

Margaret Marabella is founder of Fun Investing an
excellent resource site dedicated to information on investing

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(1) Stock Market is Tough Place to Make Any Money
Consistently

NASDAQ or SP&500 averaged about -6% per year for 5 years
between 1999 and 2003. Many individual investors who made
killing in the internet bubble period got wiped out during
those 5 years. Many who trusted Wall Street experts by
investing their life savings into mutual fund had rude
awakening after the huge loss and scandals in many of the
famous fund names.

Numerous academic studies have shown that more than 90% of
mutual funds failed to beat market over the long run and
that more than 90% of individual investors lost money in the
stock market. Too many people and too many Wall Street
experts or mutual fund managers are buying and selling
stocks like madmen, with no sound strategy or any hope of
long term success. Ironically, they’re the ones who create
opportunities for prudent, long term oriented investors.

To be successful in stock market, you either have to become
an expert yourself or to seek help from real successful
experts. Stock market is such a brutal place that there is
no room for half-expert or expert pretenders. The truth is
that only a small percentage of disciplined and experienced
people earn disproportionate huge amount of return, many
times at the expense of the rest. It is an insult to “Wall
Street expert” professional title when so many of such
“expert pretenders” failed to beat index or merely stay
break-even.

(2) Majority of huge performance claims in Ads by “Experts”
are not real

Too many investment newsletters or hot mutual funds touted
their huge past performance and went into disaster later on.
Who do you believe? I have been in this stock market long
enough to know that majority of their claims are not “real”.
I will tell you why below.

The first reason is simply due to “cheating”. Let’s be
honest about many Ads. Many of them do not tell the whole
and true story of their performance. For example, they would
tout huge percentage of gains for certain winning stocks and
hide the losing stocks. If you look deeper into their whole
portfolio performance, their portfolio performance was not
impressive at all. Many investment newsletters will have
multiple portfolios in publication. In their ads, they will
only mention the performance of the winning portfolio and
hide the losing portfolio. The problem with multiple
portfolios is that when you subscribe to their newsletters,
you would not easily know which portfolio out of many will
have best performance in the long run. Which portfolio do
you follow? Most important of all, which portfolio out of
many does the newsletter author invests for his/her own
money? If the newsletter author or the mutual fund manager
does not invest into a portfolio himself or herself, how
would you trust their services?

Even if past performance of a newsletter or a mutual fund
was pretty good, it may not indicate good performance in the
future. Many hot technology mutual funds jumped up 100% or
more in the 90’s and dived to their death after 90% to 99%
of loss. Certain investment methods such as growth stocks
investing are known to be risky. Momentum investing or day
trading methods are known to be extremely risky methods that
can wipe out life savings over night. There is simply no
free lunch. While a risky method can produce fabulous gain
in relative short term, over the long run, a risky method is
more likely to make people poorer rather than richer even if
a short term gain was gigantic. Gigantic short term gain is
just a dangerous stock market trap to lure the inexperienced
people into the market. Dreaming for instant satisfaction of
huge short term gain overnight with speculation is just a
recipe for disaster ahead.

(3) Value Investing is the Only Proven Safe Method

Value mutual funds are well known to have lower volatility
than growth mutual funds. Numerous industry and acedemic
studies have shown that value stocks as a group performed
far better than growth stocks in bear market. Many
technology and internet so called “growth stocks” lost 90%
to 99% of value in just a couple of years after 2000 while
many value stocks went up during the same time frame.

In fact, the single most important element to obtain high
investment performance over the long run is to maintain
MARGIN OF SAFETY of a portfolio. That is why the greatest
investor Warren Buffet once quote “Rule No.1: Never lose
money. Rule No.2: Never forget rule No.1.”.

(4) Value Investing is the Proven Method to Make Big Money
in the Stock Market

I know that I’m going to catch a lot of flak for saying
this, and that many people will misunderstand what I’m
saying. There are certainly other methods of investing or
trading, which made people rich. There are certainly many
under- performing value mutual funds, which give people
wrong impression that value investing is equivalent of low
performance with less risk.

However, I want to emphasize that in fact value investing is
investment style that can obtain high performance with less
risk. I want to stand by my above statement for the
following reasons:

* In the early years of my investment career, I have studied
and tried all kinds of well known methods of famous
investors or traders, Short term trading, Momentum trading,
Technical Analysis, CANSLIM, growth stock long term buy and
hold, Random Walk theory, etc. I have been there and I have
done there. Evidenced by my past investment performance,
value investing is the only method that delivered gigantic
investment return consistently for me over past many years.
In 2003, I have made more than $150,000 in stock market with
value investing method. In 2004, I have made even more money
than 2003 so far. With the power of compounding, there is
really no upper limit for the investment profit with value
investing.

* In 1984, Warren Buffet gave a speech titled The
Superinvestors of Graham-and-Doddsville, which categorized
performance of many famous value investors who beat market
year in and year out. Many of people mentioned in this
article are legendary multi-billionaire right now. It is
true that only a small percentage of investors can beat
market consistently. However, it is not by chance at all
that so many of students of Benjamin Graham became super
riches in America while other methods have not produced that
many rich people. It is also not coincident at all that the
second richest person in the world is a value investor named
Warren Buffet, a student of Benjamin Graham as well.

(5) Value investing will not distract your regular job

The nicest thing about value investing is that it will not
distract your regular job if you choose not to stare at the
stock market frequently in your office. In fact, it is quite
healthy to forget about stock market in your office and
worry about that only at your home after work.

Many newbies in the stock market still believe that if they
stare at stock price quote closely, they can obtain better
chances of winning. It will not. Staring at the stock quote
is least important part of this game. In fact, staring
closely at the stock price quote is more likely to create a
loser rather than a winner because of greed and fear in the
stock market. The more one is unable to resist the mad mood
of Mr. Market, the more likely one is unable to invest
successfully with value investment method.

I am not saying that successful value investing does not
require time. The time you will need in value investing
depends on the investment vehicle you utilize. If you invest
with a value mutual fund, you will not need much time in
stock market and you only need to follow up quarterly with
your fund’s performance. If you are a passive investor of my
investment newsletter Blast Investor Real-time Plus and you
follow my model portfolio passively, you will only need to
pay attention to my infrequent trade alert closely and read
my newsletter issues every 2 weeks. If you invest by
yourself, you will certainly need hours of time every week
to look at hundreds of value stock leads and do your own due
diligence by reading 10Q or 10K SEC filling, or by listening
to conference calls, or by talking to company’s management.

(6) Successful Value Investing is Hard, But You can Do It!

I certainly do not want to make you to believe that value
investing is as easy as reading couple of books. Value
investing not only requires tons of knowledge and expertise
in financial analysis, accounting, US tax law, US bankruptcy
law, etc., it also requires real life training of right
psychology to fight against greed and fear in the stock
market. It is hard to do.

However, successful investing certainly can be done and I
have done it over past decade myself. You certainly want to
look at my investing articles of this web site for more
information.

(7) You need to start early in value investing

Let’s be honest about value investing, it is not a get-rich-
quick scam and it takes time to really make living with
value investing without need of your regular job. You need
large starting principle if you want to make living from
stock market investment than your salary.

By reading Warren Buffet’s article above, you can pretty
much guess that successful value investors can achieve 20%
to 30% per year performance consistently over the long run
regardless of whether market is bear or bull although it is
possible to obtain significantly higher performance in
earlier investment years due to smaller fund size and luck.
20% or 30% more consistent investment return is already very
high return over the long run. Since Peter Lynch retired
from Fidelity, you can rarely find a mutual fund with that
kind of performance over past many years.

The best approach is to treat stock market investment as
side business in addition to your regular job. Your regular
job help you pay your bills and help you earn the initial
principle for value investing. Once your investment net
worth surpasses $100,000, sooner or later you will realize
that your regular job salary can hardly keep up with
compounded rate of investment return. Too many people
naively believe that they can get rich quick with
speculative trading method in stock market rather than a
hard work with a job and value investing at side. It is a
lot easier to make your first $50,000 net worth with a job
rather than speculation in stock market.

Even if you do not have large sum of money right now as
principle to make really big profit out of value investing,
you still want to start value investing early so that you
can learn in and out of value investing in your earlier
years of investing in the stock market. Successful
investment is long term process. The earlier you start
investing successfully, the better off your pocketbook will
be, and the quicker you will reach your financial freedom.
Let’s do a quick math, if your starting capital for
investing is $50,000 and your annual compouned rate of
return is 30%, you will need 9 years to surpass $500,000 net
worth. However, to turn $500,000 net worth into 1 million,
you only need 3 more years, think hard!

Webmasters and Ezine Publishers:
Free professional content - pre-licensed to you..

You are invited to use any or all of these value investing
articles in your publication or website. The only requirement
is the inclusion of the following, after each article…

* Article by Henry Lu of BlastInvest LLC, a premium
investment newsletter publisher in Connecticut. Visit
http://www.BlastInvest.com/ for FREE “how-to”
value investing assistance, web services and more.

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Naked short selling or naked shorting is an illegal stock trading practice, in which investors sell a particular stock which they do not possess and can not borrow. In capital markets, this practice is called Fail to Deliver (FTD), since the seller fails to deliver the shares to the buyer. In ordinary short selling, an investor borrows shares, which he believes overvalued, and then sells in open market. If you do so, you may make profits by buying the same shares once the share price declines after sometime. Normally, overvalued stocks fall and recover after some time. In a naked short selling, the sellers do not borrow stocks and do not intend to borrow the shares to make the delivery within the required three-days time period. The sellers fail to deliver the particular stock which they are supposed to deliver, resulting in ‘failure to deliver.’ It is widely believed that some professional investors and hedge funds are involved in naked short selling by using loop holes in the stock trading system.

How does Naked Short Selling work?

In a naked short selling, the sale is processed without the possession of the stock by the seller. Although naked short selling is illegal, it is legal under certain circumstances. For example, if you are a market maker who needs to provide shares for a stock which has limited liquidity, naked short selling becomes legal. This ‘fail to deliver’ system can create widespread deterioration in micro-cap stocks. The investors with short positions may pick on small emerging companies and cause their stocks to plummet. This would also induce investors with long positions in micro-cap stocks to abandon their positions. However, some on Wall Street believe that naked short selling is promoted by the owners of small public companies in order to divert investor attention from corporate issues and regulatory problems surrounding them.

Naked short selling may have a negative effect on the entire stock market, since the fraudulent investors can use naked short selling as an instrument to manipulate the market. Many of these illegal trades go unpunished, since only those investment companies, which are the members of the NASD are required to comply with delivery rules.

North American Securities Administrators Association (NASAA) recently commented that there has been no substantial evidence that naked short selling exists. NASAA was established to monitor the functioning of Reg SHO, a regulatory body established to modernize naked short selling rules. The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC), which provides clearance, settlement and information services for equities, corporate and municipal bonds, government and mortgage-backed securities, money market instruments and over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives transactions, said recently that 9 of the 12 cases filed against it by the plaintiffs are either dismissed or withdrawn. DTCC, however, did not deny the existence of naked short selling.

Joel Arberman is the Managing Member of Stock Aware, LLC. We publish a free investment research and analysis newsletter and offer investor awareness services. Learn more at
StockAware.com.

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It is at this time each year when we make New Year’s resolutions, to help reduce the gap between where we are today and where we want to be in the future. Having been able to speak to thousands of investors over the last five years, I have compiled a list of my favorite New Year’s resolutions that will help stock market investors, no matter which way the market goes this year.

1. Reduce Costs

While most investors are focused on how to make more money in the stock market, it is just as important to try to reduce your costs of investing. Like any good CEO, you must focus on getting the best value possible for every dollar you spend. While it would be exciting to find an area in which you could save a large sum of money, it is often the little expenses that fly just under our mental radar that end up costing us the most. Keep an eye on commissions, service fees and transaction fees. Whether you spend $49, $29, $19, or even $9.99, to make a trade, in the end, you’ll get exactly the same result.

2. Think Small

Concentrate on hitting singles, not home runs. Everyone has dreams of making it big in the stock market. But the quest to hit a big home run often comes at the expense of taking advantage of the markets’ internal ability to rise over the long-term. If you can just increase the value of your portfolio by just an extra 1% per year, it could end up netting you hundreds of thousands of dollars in extra profits over the long-term. A $500,000 portfolio, earning 4%, will be worth $1,095,561 in 20 years. Add an additional 1%, and you will increase your returns by an additional $231,000.

3. Fire Your Mutual Fund Company

According to the last count, there are over 10,000 mutual funds in North America, which means that there are more mutual funds than stocks. Why are there so many? A mutual fund company is one of the most profitable businesses to start, with little or no risk. That is why every bank, insurance company, brokerage company and financial institution in the world, also sells mutual funds. And as history tells us, lack of performance does not hinder a mutual fund company’s ability to succeed, as it would in say a business like a drug company, or an energy company. Remember the basis of the mutual fund company is to invest with other people’s money, and charge them for doing so. And they do so, while rarely ever beating the stock market indexes.
In the previous resolution, we looked at how a 1% increase, in your return, could earn you an extra $231,000. This is the same 1% return that the mutual fund companies are hoping to skim off your portfolio over the next 20 years.

Can you tell yourself, in the next 60 seconds, why you are dealing with your current mutual fund company? Is it because of the above average returns? Is it because of the lower than average fees? If not, then you may be stuck with its $231,000 gorilla sitting on your shoulders for the next 20 years.

If you do not want to fire your mutual fund company, then, you might be able to get by just being more selective in the funds that you choose from their fund family. Most mutual fund companies today now offer “Index” funds at a lower expense ratio than their normal “Managed” funds. Historically, Index funds, will outperform Managed funds over the long run. In many cases, you should be able to save, at least, 1% in your annual fees.

The more extreme solution, but increasingly popular, would be to move from mutual funds to exchange traded funds.

Exchange traded funds, or ETF’s, are very similar to mutual funds, but trade, just like stocks. In fact, some of the major exchange traded funds are now some of the most popular stocks traded on the major indexes.

4. Invest In A Mutual Fund Company

The best way to make money in mutual funds, is to invest in a mutual fund company.

5. Avoid The Crowd

Many people save for their retirement by making regular monthly contributions. This is probably the best way to save for the long-term. Unfortunately, most people make this contribution at the end of the month. With so much new money entering the market at the end of each month, stocks will often trade higher for a couple of days before, and a couple of days after month end, meaning that you may end up paying higher prices. Try moving your contribution date to the middle of the month and avoid the month end price squeeze.

6. Never Wait For The Why

Have you ever tried to tell a three-year-old to do something? Inevitably, their reply will be a one-word answer, “Why?”. Well, it seems like we never lose that childish curiosity which causes us to reply to an instruction, by asking the question why.

Unfortunately, the stock market is not in the habit of telling us why we need to do something at the time we need to do it.

If you have been waiting to take action in the market, and the opportunity presents itself, do not stop and look around for the answer to the question why. Take action first, and the answer to the question why will come later.

Why sell Enron? Why sell Taser? Why sell Krispy Kreme? Why sell General Motors?

7. Learn The Skill Of Selling

We live in a society where we are born and bred to be shoppers. From the time we wake up in the morning, until we go to sleep at night, we are bombarded with messages that tell us to buy, buy, buy. So it’s no wonder that investors find it very easy to buy stocks, but feel uncomfortable when it comes time to sell them. Selling should be about taking profits, or avoiding loss. It should not be about being right or wrong. Some of the greatest investors in the world are wrong more than they are right. But when they’re wrong, they sell quickly and reduce their loss, and risks. And when they’re right, they hold on as long as possible, until the market tells them to sell.

When the stock market fell in 2000, investors did not lose money because they did not know what stocks to buy, they lost money because they did not know when to sell.

8. The First One Now Will Later Be Last

It was nearly 40 years ago when the famous singer/songwriter, Bob Dylan, wrote those famous words “The first one now will later be last”. Obviously, Mr. Dylan was not referring to the stock market, but he could’ve been. As a society, we love success. We love to follow and idolize winners in just about any sector of society, including winners in the stock market. Unfortunately, it is very rare that you see a winner repeat its performance, year after year.

What was the best-performing stock, mutual fund or sector last year, will not be the best-performing stock, mutual fund or sector this year.

Don’t chase success. Buying last year’s best-performing anything, could be one of the most costly investment mistakes you ever make.

9. Manage What You Can Manage

When a baseball coach walks out, onto the field, is he managing the players on his team, or the spectators in the stands?
When you look at the stock market, are you trying to manage all the stocks in the stock market, or are you trying to manage your selected group of better than average stocks, ETF’s, and mutual funds?
There is a logical reason why there are only so many players on a sports team; why there are only so many soldiers in a platoon; and why there are only so many people working for an accounts receivable manager.

Your goal should be to keep the list of the things that you’re following as small as possible.
If you’re following more stocks than the president has seats of his cabinet table, you’re probably following too many.

Have a Happy New Year and all the best to you and your family in 2006.

Stephen Whiteside is the CEO of the online

stock market timing service, TheUpTrend.com, providing investors with daily,
weekly and monthly trend analysis, buy & sell signals, price targets, and
Smart Money Alerts, on over 1,500 leading
North American companies.

Stephen Whiteside is the CEO of the online stock market timing service TheUpTrend.com , that provides Investors with daily, weekly and monthly trend analysis, buy & sell signals, price targets, support & resistance price levels, and Smart Money Alerts, on over 1,500 leading North American companies listed on the TSX, NYSE, and the NASDAQ.

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Today many traders buy commodity trading systems and spent money on expensive software when really all they need is to do a bit of research on the net and build their own.

Here we will show you how to build your own commodity trading system that will help you pile up big gains, even if you have never traded before.

First things first!

Let’s look at the logic the commodity trading system is based on:

1. Catching the big long term trends and these only come a few times a year. These are the ones to focus on - not short term moves or day trading, this system is geared for profit not low odds trades in short term market noise.

2. This commodity trading system does not predict, it only acts on confirmation of the tend.

3. The system is simple. Traders think that the more complicated a system the better it is likely to perform, the exact opposite is however true.

4. This system uses the same trading methodology for ALL markets and is based on a psychological flaw most traders have and lose.

5. As this system is based on long term trends it should take no more than 30 minutes a day and will work off the closing price ONLY.

Putting it together

This commodity trading system is technically based, so let’s look at what we Need the package to contain. All we want is weekly and daily charts and two basic indictors Bollinger bands and stochastics.

A good package on the web is available at futuresource.com, but there are many others, don’t buy one! You don’t need to.

Trading rules

Trading rules are simple:

1. Look for important valid (several tests over long time span) resistance and support on the weekly chart and note the trend, then look for the same pattern on the daily charts.

2. Once you have found a market that fits the above criteria look for breaks of support or resistance. Don’try and predict wait for the move to get underway i.e you have confirmation (via the stochastic indicator) this is when the odds of the trend continuing are highest.

3. Check the stochastic indicator supports the move this VERY important.

4. Enter with at the money or in the money. Do not buy out eh money options and remember keep time on your side.

5. Don’t move stops to soon, get stop in below breakout point and move immediately to entry if the position moves your way. Wait for larger profits and cover the position with covered write position.

That’s it; If you are not familiar with all the terms check our other articles.

Why will this commodity system work?

It’s based on sound logic, breakouts are easy to understand and trade, most traders wait for market pullbacks and miss the major moves. This system gets you in on ALL the major moves and confirms strength before buying, to get the odds on your side.

Keep this fact in mind - Most major trends develop from market highs, that means you have to trade breakouts.

Most traders get stopped out by volatility, but this system assumes the trend will continue rather than reverse as it’s already in motion, so stops are kept wide. When the profit becomes big you can put in an insurance policy, in the form of a covered write option strategy.

Finally, options can be used but unlike the losing majority you won’t buy out the money options with little chance of success. You will keep time on your side and buy in at or near the money.

The other advantage of this system is it costs nothing and is easy to understand.

This means when you practice it, you will have confidence and be able to trade with Discipline, which is a key to trading success with a commodity trading system.

Don’t listen to traders who try and tell you trading commodity systems needs to be complicated, it does not. A simple commodity trading system like the above, traded with discipline is all you need.

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There are far more players in the Australian mortgage industry than ever before. Consumers no longer have to visit multiple banks and direct lenders personally, spending valuable time trying to sort through all the financial details and make a comparison on their own. Today, the mortgage is filled with competitive players that include non-bank lenders, mortgage managers and mortgage brokers, and most notably, online mortgage sites such as Mortgagemall.com.au that have brought unparalleled convenience and choice to the Australian mortgage consumer. In today’s highly competitive environment, it’s more important than ever for consumers to understand their options. The Internet has become an important tool in achieving that level of understanding, and in gathering and comparing relevant information from multiple providers.

With stable interest rates and affordability throughout the country, the mortgage market will continue to experience strong growth. In addition to a stable economy and job market, population growth, most notably in Queensland, will fuel the mortgage market as more Australians find themselves in a position to enter the housing market as first-time buyers.

According to the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA) (http://www.apra.gov.au), banks are starting to lose some of their market share to non-bank mortgage providers and brokers. The presence of non-bank lenders and Internet-based intermediaries is good news for the Australian consumer, for two reasons: more choice, and easier research. Besides independent online sites like Mortgage Mall, major mortgage brokers such as AFG (http://www.afgonline.com.au) and Aussie Home Loans (http://www.eaussie.com.au) dominate the mortgage broker field.

While online sites present the easiest starting point, Australian banks are refining their operations to become more accommodating to their customers. Banks like ANZ Bank (http://www.anz.com.au) and the Bank of Queensland (http://www.boq.com.au) have been expanding to add more branches; and banks throughout Australia have been refining their services to better accommodate their customers. A number of banks have introduced online services that make all sorts of actions and transactions more convenient for the end user.

Australian homebuyers currently have more opportunities than ever before to take advantage of recent trends. Whether this may mean being able to select a loan package with lower fees and charges or finding a more suitable mortgage product by using independent resources, the rate of home ownership is expected to rise in the next few years. This, when coupled with the fact that many of the processes are improving and becoming more consumer-friendly, means that now may be the right time to obtain a home loan.

Copyright 2006 Tracey Anderson

Tracey Anderson is a mortgage broker with 16 years experience in the Australian mortgage industry. She currently works with a number of broker networks including Mortgage Mall both as a broker and an expert industry analyst. For more information and resources on the mortgage industry, visit Mortgage Mall (http://www.mortgagemall.com.au).

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