PPCA Launches Market Commentary Service & Receives Award

SAN CLEMENTE, CA, November 8 – PPCA announces new market commentary service, replacing commentaries it had been distributing for free since 2000 with a new subscription arrangement. "We've received a lot of support and encouragement for this new structure" said Ron Surz, President. The January, 2005 commentary was recently awarded the prestigious Stephen L. Kessler award for "outstanding contribution to the field of investment consulting." The award is sponsored by the Investment Management Consultants Association (IMCA). Aside from the revenues for the $600 per year service, PPCA believes that a for-fee structure elevates the commentaries. Free commentaries are pretty much taken for granted. With this fee structure readership may actually increase. PPCA has entered into a non-exclusive marketing agreement with Research and Markets, London, to help build a subscriber base.

The commentaries are designed to improve market intelligence so better decisions can be made going forward. Each month we identify the segments of the stock market that have behaved well and poorly with several objectives in mind:

• Identify trends in investor preferences
• Establish a framework for evaluating investment manager performance
• Put investment performance into perspective

We examine style, economic sector, and country effects so the reader has a good sense of what is working and what is not, and we explain these effects with graphics that are very easy to read and understand. As one reader recently put it "This is absolutely fabulous. In 3 pages you've defined everything I've been doing as a money manager for the last 9 months, but it's taken me 100 times the amount of explanation that this took. Thanks for the concise and clear story."

Each month we examine U.S. market behavior, and in the last month of each quarter we also examine non-U.S. markets, as well as year-to market behavior. Included in each issue:

• Factors that have been driving the stock markets and why
• Analysis of popular index results
• Opinions on future market behavior

Also, once a year in January we write an extensive review of the long-run capital markets, going back to 1926, discussing the risk-reward characteristics of these markets and how the recent past stacks up against this history. Some highlights include:

• Risk and return statistics for stocks, bonds, Treasury bills and inflation.
• Probabilities of earning various rates of return, and of avoiding losses
• Histograms of stock and bond returns. These are very popular graphs.
• Best and worst stock and bond markets for various time horizons