Despite a soft economy and crappy consumer confidence, Apple has shown they can beat the trends with fantastic products and services. News has recently come out stating that 3 million iPhones have been sold in its first month of the new iteration of the iPhone going on sale. Also, 60 million applications have been purchased through the new AppStore. Jobs was quoted as saying he has never seen anything like it when it comes to software.

The news was welcomed with a great reaction in the markets with the stock up nicely. What does it mean for the long term shareholder?

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It’s an exciting time for the markets. We are at a low for 2008 and many think this market downturn is here to stay, myself included. The current economic conditions are more than simply a credit crunch in the financial system, it is a low-growth, inflationary, deflationary environment that will get worse before it gets better. Let’s take a look at why the Dow is likely headed lower.

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How do you plan to make money during bear markets? I have been writing recently about how the near term future has numerous head winds which should be damaging to equity prices. It seems the market has been agreeing with me over the last weeks. What are you doing to beat the market and make money when the market is getting slaughtered?

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What is the key to being a better investor? Well, part of it is by learning from your past successes and mistakes. If you make trades, take your profits or cut your losses without any reviewing or analysis of your investing moves, then you are missing out on a huge part of investing. This huge part of investing is what can catapult you into another level of investing success and higher returns. Let’s take a look at what I mean exactly.

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I just read another Yahoo Finance article that gave the same repetitive lesson on investing: diversify, diversify, diversify.  As far as I’m concerned, you have two options in investing.

The first option is diversification; however, not diversification how most recommend which is buying a bunch of different stocks in a bunch of different industries. Why spend so much effort on simply trying to match overall market returns? If this investment approach appeals to you, achieve diversification by simply buying an S&P Index Fund and that’s it. Continue pouring your money into this position over time and you should perform inline with long term historical average returns.

Your second option is to attempt to outperform the market which is what we here at 20s Money are fighting towards. Diversification is not the path to achieving superior returns.

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Anybody with even the smallest investing experience knows the name of Warren Buffett. While there have been massive amounts of analysis over his record and investing strategy, I’d like to focus on just a handful of notes regarding the legendary investor and his company, Berkshire Hathaway.

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