Despite a ho-hum week, the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index has already gained more than 4.6 percent in the young year, and emerging markets have done even better. The Hang Seng index in Hong Kong has risen more than 11 percent, even counting time off for the Lunar New Year holiday.

In the United States, some strategists’ year-end targets are already at hand. Jim McDonald, the chief investment strategist for Northern Trust, for example, projected that the S.& P. would finish the year at 1,330. It briefly surpassed that mark last week.

“The market may have front-ended its returns for the entire year,” Mr. McDonald said. For the moment, he is not upgrading his forecast.

Then the piece shifts to practical advice, and that’s where things get ambiguous.

What is an ordinary investor, one with no claims to financial sophistication, to do under these circumstances? The same thing he or she should do under most circumstances: maintain a well-balanced, diversified portfolio while trying not to worry too much about day-to-day market noise.

Of course, investors trying to save enough for retirement or for a house or for a child’s education need to assess the amount of risk they can bear and the amount of time that they can wait for a return on their assets. Right now, Mr. Applegate advises investors to “underweight” equities and to add some riskless ballast like cash and short-term Treasuries.

That’s could be very sound advice for most investors, but how do you know?

Maybe you should lower your exposure to equities. But by how much? And how should that advice affect you if you’re 25 compared to if you’re 65, or if you’re already too risk averse for stocks?

That’s exactly what we’re working to solve at Riskalyze. An article like this might resonate with you and cause you to become less tolerant of taking big risks this year.

If you’re a Riskalyze user, you simply recapture your Risk Fingerprint, and your portfolio search will instantly reflect your heightened aversion to risk. Some users might see their allocation into stocks drop 5%. Others might see a drop of 10% or 15% or more.

There is no shortage of ideas about investing. We’re excited about building the “personalization layer” for investing, so that you can take those ideas and align your investments with your risk tolerance and beliefs about the future, in just a few easy clicks.

I hope you’ll give it a try.

From their rhetoric, it’s clear that Hollywood still hasn’t learned anything from this. And then it struck me…why don’t we teach them?

Since they’re so persnickety about licensing agreements, let’s amend all of our terms of use to require all movie moguls to use a special “Hollywood Edition” of our products.

Here are some of the special new features we’ll be giving them…

• Before you can do a Google search, you have to sit through five minutes of ads for Google Chrome, Chromebooks by Samsung, Android Phones by Motorola, and that amazing straight-to-video blockbuster, Google+. And oh yeah, don’t even think about trying to skip the ads. A cute little red “X” appears in the corner of your screen if you try to do that.
• Microsoft Word will no longer allow you to read or edit movie scripts that are obvious takeoffs from other movies. We get the message: remixing content to make something new is wrong. Bonus for us: this would have stopped you from absolutely ruining “Arthur” in the remake.
• If you fly off to your vacation home in the south of France, your Mac won’t boot up at all. Remember, it’s your fault for traveling – just buy another one with the right “region code.”
• Twitter still works fine in the Hollywood Edition. But all tweets are delayed for about three hours, unless you want to pay $10 a day to see them immediately. Bonus for you: every other tweet will offer you some really overpriced popcorn.

So enjoy “Hollywood Edition,” you movie moguls. Remember, we’re doing this for YOU because you’re the customer, and we want to make sure you’re well entertained.

Based on what we’ve learned from you, the best way to do that is annoying you to no end.

Then weeks like the last one come along. There’s an avalanche of work to do. And I can either choose to get the key things done, or to be organized. But not both.

I had to consciously choose to focus this week. To ignore the mounting piles of email. To ignore the stacked up voice mails. To ignore the task list with 38 overdue things on it.

I had to let go of order and simplicity, put my head down and get something done, which finally got wrapped up last night.

And while it didn’t feel good during that process, it sure feels good to have finished scaling the mountain.

Enjoy your weekend while I try to return some things back to order.

This is a combination of video and time-lapse photography…and it comes awfully close. Do yourself a favor: put it on full screen. Best 3 minutes of your morning.

Amazing! Thanks to my friend Casey for sending this my way.

Suffice it to say, when the old guard was in charge, the Journal didn’t bother to cover the good things happening at Sierra College. (I don’t know if it was a written or unwritten rule, but all of our progress at Sierra apparently didn’t fit the editor’s preconceived narrative, and he just ignored the news he didn’t like.)

So I cancelled my subscription and hadn’t bothered to read it more than a handful of times over the last six or seven years.

The new guard seems to be taking a new and constructive approach. Covering both the good news and the bad news. Taking care not to cross the line into demagoguery. Writing good, solid opinion pieces on the side of the public interest.

Today, they published an editorial about the last six years of settlement agreements with public employees. I wrote about this back in November. It’s just wrong that state law tilts the playing field so far against the taxpayers and good stewardship of their money.

The Journal is absolutely right to call for reform in our state’s laws about compensation and employment. Their coverage of this issue shows a real understanding of the facts. So I just followed them on Twitter and I’m going to be a regular reader.

And who knows? They may even get me to subscribe again.

He also gave about 16% of his income to charity. I don’t know about you, but that’s also more than I gave. (The national average is 2%, which I did manage to beat.)

Lost in all of this is the simple fact that he worked for and earned all of his income. None of it was handed to him.

And in exchange for working hard, he gets to enjoy the fruits of his labors…after providing food stamps for 5,977 people, paying for the education of 75 students, paying the salaries of 44 privates in the US Army and paying for the Medicaid benefits of 159.

Rather than tearing down the rich and pretending that they are earning their money at the expense of someone else, perhaps we should be celebrating the successful. After all, they pay most of the taxes and make so much possible for the rest of us.

We’ve been honored to be a part of the leadership team that has raised over $300,000 to build classrooms at these schools. We are true believers in the idea that delivering great education and two meals a day will help families to stay together, break the cycle of poverty and begin to put an end to the global orphan crisis.

Late afternoon on Friday, we launched the next phase of the project: child sponsorships.

Most child sponsorship programs are $30-$36 per month. We’re a volunteer-run program without any US administrative staff managing the program. So we’ve been able to keep the cost very low…just $19/month per child!

So Cacey and I decided we’d sponsor two of these kids…one for each of ours.

Spencer is sponsoring Minyahel…remember his story in “Just a Little Bit More“?

And Emma is sponsoring Etalamahu, a five year old in Lower Kindergarten…and did you notice, these photos were taken right in front of the new classroom building you all helped to build last year?

In a little more than two days, we’ve already had 26 kids sponsored and there are only 162 left before every single one can stay in school, learn the skills they need to break the cycle of poverty, and get the life-changing food to allow them to stay with their families or caregivers.

This isn’t the long term vision for funding these schools. Our next step is to raise up in-country business ventures to fund the school’s operations and make the entire project self-sustainable. We can’t wait to come back to you and say “mission accomplished.”

But in the mean time, we hope you’ll consider making your own dent in the universe by sponsoring one of these awesome kids.

So I cracked up when I ran across this send-up on Facebook…enjoy “If You Give a Mom a Muffin.”

If you give a mom a muffin, she’ll want a cup of coffee to go with it. She’ll pour herself some. Her three-year-old will spill the coffee. She’ll wipe it up. Wiping the floor, she will find dirty socks. She’ll remember she has to do laundry. When she puts the laundry in the washer, she’ll trip over boots and bump into the freezer. Bumping into the freezer will remind her she has to plan supper. She will get out a pound of hamburger. She’ll look for her cookbook.

The cookbook is sitting under a pile of mail. She will see the phone bill, which is due tomorrow. She will look for her checkbook. The checkbook is in her purse that is being dumped out by her two-year-old. She’ll smell something funny. She’ll change the two-year-old. While she is changing the two-year-old the phone will ring. Her five-year-old will answer and hang up. She’ll remember that she wants to phone a friend to come for coffee. Thinking of coffee will remind her that she was going to have a cup. She will pour herself some. And chances are, if she has a cup of coffee, her kids will have eaten the muffin that went with it.

My sweetie will vouch for the fact that this is 100% accurate. Have a great weekend!

You have a dream. You put together an organization and start raising money. You never have enough money to fund yourself forever…only to get yourself to the next big milestone.

To gain market traction, you focus in on your niche. On the Republican side, Mitt Romney is focused on economic and national security conservatives. Rick Santorum is focused on social conservatives. Ron Paul on the libertarian-minded folks. They’ve each gotten some level of traction with their respective “niche markets.”

But one key difference comes after you start getting traction.

If you’re a presidential candidate, you really have to expand beyond your initial niche market and start appealing to a broader coalition (hopefully without losing many initial supporters) or you’ll never win a diverse set of primaries, much less a general election.

But if you’re a startup and you’ve chosen your niche well, you can build a profitable, growing and incredibly successful business without expanding your target much at all. You certainly might want to at some point, but there are plenty of successful companies who never do.

Riskalyze is laser-focused on the needs of non-day-trading self-directed investors. The folks who open an E*TRADE or TD Ameritrade or Charles Schwab account and manage their own brokerage or retirement account.

I don’t know if we’ll eventually expand our focus beyond that market niche. But I do know this: we’ve got a game-changing product that has clearly struck a chord with that kind of investor.

So that’s where our focus will be for a long time.

You can check out the interview here.

If you aren’t already a fan of Tradestreaming, they’ve got some incredible resources and an awesome weekly email newsletter with interesting links. Check it out at Tradestreaming.com.