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When I read the following article at SmartMoney, I said to myself. “I have done almost as well, I am more diversified, and I am willing to explain more of what I do.”

Truth is, clever investors, or lucky investors can get an attitude, saying that they don’t have to explain themselves to outsiders.  Not a good place to be.  I am not saying that the performance is due to luck but there is a certain amount of respect due to investors for investing with you.

Before I write more, let me state that I respect Allan Mecham.  He manages more money than I do, and has a better track record.  If I were in the shoes of the investors who were analyzing him, I probably would have placed $5 million with him, and would have watched what he did carefully.

Why would I take the risk?  It’s tough to find non-consensus views that make significant money.  I wouldn’t want to make it a huge allocation initially, but I would put a toe in the water to see what he would actually do.  If it didn’t work over 5 years, I would pull the plug.

All that said, when you run a very concentrated portfolio, it is possible for a few decisions to [continue]…

“At the time he owned a building supply company, and he ran most of the business through his Yahoo e-mail account,” Prangley says. “But he hadn’t left his password with anyone, so the family had no way of accessing the contents. We didn’t know which orders had been filled, what was coming in, who the business owed money to, or who to bill.”

Yahoo would only provide the password with a court order. “As an attorney, I knew that takes at least a month,” Prangley says. “The business couldn’t wait that long.” With important records sealed off, the business lost a significant amount of money and eventually closed.

Computer passwords, increasingly the portals to our financial and personal lives, can be sealed in [continue]…

Best climate in the world: Italy (scored 98/100)

Scoring a country on its climate is difficult, because everyone has their own ideas on what sort weather they enjoy most. But it was Italy’s ability to cater to all tastes that saw it surge to the top of IL’s Retirement Index 2012 in the Climate category.

The weather in Italy is quite different from the stereotypical Mediterranean climate with many of its inland northern regions enjoying weather more on par with what is found with southern France and other continental countries further north. This tends to translate into hot summers and often quite dramatic, picturesque snow-swept winters.

But head south to the coastal areas of Liguria and most of the peninsula south of Florence and you get the more typical Mediterranean weather—mild winters and warm, dry summers.

Altitude also plays a part. Italy’s highland areas regularly get snow during winter while the lower-lying land in the south rarely gets uncomfortably cold, even in winter.

The second best climate in the world: France (scored 90/100)

France, coming in second, also enjoys a varied climate. Northern regions are temperate while north-eastern areas have a more [continue]…

International investor Jim Rogers said he doesn’t have U.S. stocks or the British pound in his portfolio, which includes euros, dollars, renminbi and precious metals such as gold and silver.

“Everybody’s having a wonderful time running the printing presses,” Rogers, chairman of Rogers Holdings, said in a television interview with CNBC in Singapore. “The way to protect yourself at a time like that, historically anyway, has been to own real assets. Those are my longs, and currencies.”

The Standard and Poor’s 500 Index has gained 8 percent this year, while the S&P GSCI index of 24 commodities has climbed 6.4 percent and gold 11 percent.

Rogers said he expects more currency turmoil as global central banks inject stimulus into the economy through quantitative easing and investors should buy commodities “when that happens.”

“Probably none of us are going to own any paper money at all ultimately, but that’s later in this decade, because paper money is becoming very suspect everywhere in the world,” he said. “I don’t own any U.S. equities,” he said, adding “I don’t own the pound sterling, although I do love the U.K. a great deal.”

While the pound is up about 2 percent against the [continue]…

The obituary of John Fairfax (who passed at 74 years old on February 8th) has absolutely lit up the internet over this weekend, he is being called the real-life Most Interesting Man in the World by all who read it…

    At 9, he settled a dispute with a pistol. At 13, he lit out for the Amazon jungle.

    At 20, he attempted suicide-by-jaguar. Afterward he was apprenticed to a pirate. To please his mother, who did not take kindly to his being a pirate, he briefly managed a mink farm, one of the few truly dull entries on his otherwise crackling résumé, which lately included a career as a professional gambler.

You have to get over there and check this thing out, it’s an amazing life story [continue]…

“It is a decent confidence barometer,” said Scott Wren, a senior equity strategist for Wells Fargo Advisors. “Investors are confident enough to buy some of these small companies, betting that the U.S. economy is going to continue to grow.”

Most of that money poured into the small-cap stocks in the seven days that ended Feb. 8, the last tally by Lipper. During that time, the Labor Department reported a gain of [continue]…

* U.S. goal is to create 100,000 new farmers

* $1.8 billion in U.S. loans to beginning farmers in 2011

* Iowa, Nebraska, Minnesota top states for new farmer loans

* Specialty crops, organic food a focus

by Carey Gillam

Dan Pugh wishes he had a bigger tractor and his wife Laura worries about their chickens in the winter weather. But as new farmers putting down roots in rural Missouri, the Pughs are counting on more rewards than regrets in trading their city lives for the country.

A better quality of food and life are among the factors that caused Dan, 47, to leave a career in sales last year and move Laura, 48, and their two young children to 50-acres (20 hectares) of rolling pastureland they call Honey Creek Farm.

The Pughs will plant their first crop of organic spinach and lettuces in the next few weeks on ground they tilled behind the barn they converted into a two-bedroom home. They are shopping for sheep and hogs. And though their first hives of bees mysteriously died, Laura is determined to develop a successful honey operation as well.

“The whole food and farming system is so out of whack,” Dan Pugh said. “We want better and we can do something to help other people eat better.”

For those who remember the American TV series, call it the “Green Acres” effect. Fueled by an economic downturn that has curtailed the upward mobility of many corporate jobs, general dissatisfaction with suburban stresses and growing discontent with what they see as the ills of industrialized agriculture, thousands of families across the United States have left suburban cul de sacs and headed to the countryside – forging a new demographic of family farmer.

The U.S. government is not only monitoring the trend, it is [continue]….

In light of Google’s latest user-tracking snafu, a guide to leaving behind fewer digital breadcrumbs and fingerprints.

by Quentin Fottrell

Online, everyone’s an open book — and an open wallet. Users increasingly wear their hearts on their screens, and security experts say sites are growing more adept at tracking their every move.

Privacy settings clearly aren’t enough judging from revelations Friday that Google and other advertisers found creative ways to exploit Apple’s Safari web-browsing software.

According to a report in The Wall Street Journal, Google disabled code that allowed it to circumvent privacy settings after being contacted by the paper. In a statement, Google says it didn’t use these “cookies” — little pieces of code stored on user computers or mobile devices that tell a company what sites consumers visit on the web and what they do there.

But this latest episode raises an important question for consumers: Can we maintain a healthy virtual lifestyle — interact with friends, buy products and visit our favorite sites — and still remain incognito?

“The odds are against you as a consumer, your online life is probably already compromised by spyware,” says Rick Dakin, CEO of IT security business Coalfire.

SmartMoney.com spoke to some experts about how to remain invisible online to advertisers, market researchers and other businesses who buy and sell information about consumer behavior.

Here are their tips [continue]…