So what do your Investment Manager and your neighborhood bartender have in common, other than the probability that you spend more time with the latter during market corrections? Antoine Tedesco, in his The History of Cocktails article, lists three things that mixologists consider important to remember and to understand when making a cocktail: 1) the base spirit, which gives the drink its main flavor; 2) the mixer or modifier, which blends well with the main spirit without overpowering it; 3) the flavoring, which brings it all together.

Similarly, your Investment Manager needs to: 1) put together a portfolio that is based on your financial situation, goals, and plans, providing both a sense of direction and a framework for decision making; 2) use a well defined and consistent investment methodology that fits well with the investment plan without leading it in tangential directions; 3) exercise experienced judgment in the day-to-day decision making that brings the whole thing together and makes it grow.

Tedesco explains that new cocktails are the result of experimentation and curiosity; that they reflect the moods of society; and that they change rapidly as both bartenders and their customers seek out new and different concoctions to popularize. The popularity of most newbies is fleeting; the reign of the old stalwarts is history--- with the exception, perhaps, of Goats Delight and Hoptoad. But, rest assured, the Old Tom Martini is here to stay!

Its likely that many of the products, derivatives, funds, and fairy tales that emanate from Wall Street were thrown together over ti many martunies at Bobby Vans or Ciprianis, and just like alcohol, the addictive products created in lower Manhattan have led many a Hummer load of speculators down the Holland tubes. The financial products of the day are themselves, products of the moods of society. The wizards experiment tirelessly; the customers search for the Holy Grail cocktail is endless. Curiosity kills many retirement plans.

Investment portfolio mixology doesnt take place in the smiley faced environment that brought us the Cosmo and the Kamikaze, but putting an investment cocktail together without the risk of addictive speculations, or bad after tastes, is a valuable talent worth finding or developing for yourself. The starting point should be a trip to portfolio-tending school, where the following courses of study are included in the Investment Mixology Program:

(1) Understanding Investment Securities. Investment securities can be divided into two major classes that make the planning exercise called asset allocation relatively straightforward. The purpose of the equity class is to generate profits in the form of capital gains. Income securities are expected to produce a predictable and stable cash flow in the form of dividends, interest, royalties, rents, etc.

All investment securities involve some form of risk, but risk can be minimized with appropriate diversification disciplines and sensible selection criteria. Still, regardless of your skills in selection and diversification, all securities will fluctuate in market price and should be expected to do so with semi-predictable, cyclical regularity.

(2) Planning Securities Decisions. There are three basic decision processes that require guideline development and procedural discipline: what to buy and when; when to sell and what; what to hold on to and why.

(3) Market Cycle Management. Most securities portfolio market values are influenced by the semi predictable movements of several inter-related economic cycles: interest rates, the IGVSI, the US economy, and the world economy. The cycles themselves will be influenced by Mother Nature, politics, and other short-term concerns and disruptions.

(4) Performance Evaluation. Historically, Peak-to-Peak analysis was most popular for judging the performance of individual and mutual fund growth in market value because it could be separately applied to the long-term cyclical movement of both classes of investment security. More recently, short-term fluctuations in the DJIA and S