Merriman Capital provides a great article on finding the best risk versus reward profile for each individual investor. This is a very well thought out article on how figure out your personal tradeoff between risk or reward when it comes to investing. Merriman Capital, also has a pretty decent podcast (as long as you can stand their Seminar ads) for the novice investor. You can find it by searching in iTunes.

From TechCruch, Google Checkout offers low-cost transactions for sellers; what’s in it for me? Um, ditto what they said!

I have to disagree with Matt Krantz of the USA Today. In his reader Q and A titled, “Six stocks? No, you are not diversified.”, he explains to his reader that he does not think owning six stocks in different sectors means you are diversified. In general, I get the point he is trying to make to the reader. Yet, he doesn’t explain different types of risk such as systematic versus unsystematic. Instead he just tells the reader to invest in an ETF.

In the acadamia world of finance there have been different theories as to how many stocks signficantly reduce unsystematic risk. Some researchers say 5-10 individual stocks in different sectors, while others say a “basket” of 12-18 stocks will significantly reduce risk.

The main reason I disagree with Mr. Krantz is that he is telling someone who has invested in individual stocks to “get out”. I completely disagree. If someone is going to put the time in to try and invest in individual stocks, it’s not great advice to tell them to invest in an ETF without knowing their background or “story”.

Star Jones is leaving the View? Not that I enjoy the view, but I hate Star Jones! Good riddance you loud mouth.

Warren Buffett will begin to give 85% of his holdings in Berkshire Hathaway to philanthropic endeavors beginning in July. The biggest winner, getting approximately $30 billiion will be the Gates Foundation, the private foundation of Melinda and Bill Gates. The Gates family has been good friends with Buffett since the early 1990s.

Wouldn’t you love to have this type of problem? What charities to donate $35 billion?

Personal Finance Advice, unveils the “Commute Helper”. You have got to read this. What an amazing, but somewhat scary job. Jump in a car with a stranger, and get paid to sit there so that the driver can get into the carpool lane and cruise to work. At $200 a day, that’s roughly $50,000 a year (not calculating taxes, which I don’t think a person like this would be claiming).

CNN reports that average daily CEO Pay is $42,000. All I can say is WOW. That is a lot of people’s annual salary. Houston, I think we have a problem.

Kiplinger’s, via Yahoo! Finance, brings us “What You Need to Know About ETFs”. Provided in this article are 6 important things to know about ETFs. Most important: ETF expense ratios are among the lowest compared to mutual fund index funds and this can boost your portfolio’s performance over time.

Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies says that we may have ups and downs but the long-term overall housing picture looks fine. “Demographic changes and population expansion will help keep home demand - and prices - healthy. The number of homes needed to meet demand in the next 10 years will likely exceed the 18.1 million units built from 1995 to 2004.”

Well this is nice to know. The long term housing market should be here to stay because of natural population growth, aging baby boomers buying second homes, and minority ownership increasing.

Motley Fool brings us “The 4 Best Words of Investing Advice”. How simple and to the point can “Buy what you know”, “Buy low, sell high” and “Buy an index fund” be?

But be warned, “Plenty of people bought Krispy Kreme because they “knew it,” and that was a disaster…Simply put, acting on “buy what you know” doesn’t lead you anywhere in particular.”