Equity Holdings for Individual Investors

Rich and his wife Kim are both very interested in having your help to invest their funds.  Equity Holdings for Individual Investors and they will pay you a decent amount for it.  (and let you all use their complimentary passes to Sugar Bowl and Squaw Valley!). Rich is a chemist (plastics, industrial applications). He works in a large firm located in the Bay Area. His wife has an undergraduate degree in business.  (University of Virginia, Marketing major). She works for a well-known marketing firm. They have two children (10 and 8 years old) They want to have their retirement needs covered by their 401(k) plans at work, and would like to put together an investment plan.

At the moment, they have $150,000 in cash, which they were thinking of investing in real estate. They actually looked into a couple of places (Miami area, and Phoenix). The options they have been considering are:
a) Going forward with the real estate investment, and finding some additional mutual funds in which to invest the excess cash.
b) Putting together a big chunk of funds and investing in individual stocks (target 10 firms).
They would like your investment advisory firm to help them with this particular option.

What are the examples of Equity Holdings for Individual Investors

Please limit your answers to one (long) paragraph.
1. What does your firm recommend to them concerning options a) and b) above? Be specific
about the amount you recommend Kim and Rick to invest in the stock portfolio and about
companies and investment percentages in each (target 10 stocks).
2. Is it a good time to invest in the stock market for Kim and Rich?
3. Kim and Rich have a brokerage account with the Bank of America, and ?as we noted earlier–
they have a small amount of funds in the Vanguard 500 Index.

4) summary information on each of the companies, and

5) a one-page spreadsheet summary table with relevant indicators on the recommended companies.