Making the most out of future stock market investments involves capturing the "risk premium" offered by more volatile stocks. You should consider the mutual funds that invest in them.

The term "risk premium" describes the extra rate of return that the "invisible hand" of economic forces will offer to investors who can handle more sleepless nights as markets crater.

Someone investing entirely in small companies, for instance, can expect to earn 12 percent per year over 30 years as opposed to just 10 percent per year as the average long-term return for the S&P 500.

My recent Florida road trip had, as its primary purpose, the challenge of helping my parents move to assisted living from independent living.

More on that later, but I started the trip by attending a pension industry conference at the Breakers Hotel in Palm Beach Florida. Parked at the front of this palatial building was a brand new Rolls-Royce convertible which is priced, I found out, at $443,000. Flipping through a local real estate magazine, the houses for sale nearby ranged from $6 to $36 million. I wondered, who are these people?

Remember Jim Carrey in that movie, "Dumb and Dumber"? If you're in a 401(K) plan, there's a good chance that it's run by Fidelity -- a company that dominates the industry with 11 million participants.

Some former Fidelity marketing executives shared some inside knowledge with me that might make me feel like Jim Carrey if I happened to be in a Fidelity plan. I know that sounds harsh, but here's a little background:

That Bob Brinker. While some people think the sun rises and sets with his financial advice, I have to take him with a grain of salt. But then I don't know anyone who has consistently been correct on market forecasting.

For example, Brinker completely missed the latest crash. However, his radio show on more than 400 stations is popular with millions who tune in regularly, and his newsletter is full of good advice. If you don't want to tune in, you can read an interpretation of the show by subscribing to the online newsletter by David Korn.

Every single registered voter in America should be duckwalked into a theater to see "Inside Job," the new documentary on what and who contributed to the collapse of our financial system.

It's one thing to have read articles and books outlining what people knew and when they knew it, but most of what we learned was piecemeal -- death by a thousand cuts. This movie packs it all into a two-hour blast, and the medium becomes the message. The story is compelling and easy to follow thanks to charts, graphs, visual tools and a narrative that reads like a novel.

Walking through a packed mall, it's hard to believe that ATMs came within 24 hours of shutting down when the banking industry froze up. Or, that the fired manager of bond-trading who destroyed Merrill Lynch had $10,000 in cash taped to the inside of his desk. He obviously was prepared for a scene out of Cormac McCarthy's "The Road."

Critics of the federal bailout program TARP can't appreciate how ugly things might have been if we taxpayers hadn't stepped up to the plate.

In response to those who are badmouthing "Obamacare," it's important to keep in mind the standard of comparison. That was the increasingly dysfunctional "free-market," health-care system with monopolistic and price-fixing powers that was costing us twice what any other industrialized country was charging citizens for their health-care system.

In this epic battle between Jerry Brown and Meg Whitman, the question of which one will be most effective at reining in state employee pension benefits should make this a one-issue election. By comparison, nothing else really matters.

As former President Ronald Reagan used to say, "There you go again." This time it's the re-emergence of complicated investment products by the financial services industry to assuage the fears of the investing public.

A re-packaged idea gaining traction in the aftermath of the recent crash is the market-linked certificate of deposit. It guarantees a CD rate of about 1.5 percent, while it also promises to pay half of whatever the gain in the S&P 500 index turns out to be over the next five years -- if the latter is greater than the CD's rate.

An old "Far Side" carton by Gary Larson has pioneers cowering as Indians send flaming arrows into their circled wagons. "Can they DO that?" asks one of the hapless mule skinners to another.

I think about this today when hearing about Mark Zuckerberg, the 26-year-old-founder of Facebook, a social net-working site with more than 500 million registered users. Zuckerberg is suddenly worth roughly $7 billion, which makes him richer than Apple's Steve Jobs. "Can they DO that?"