When you draft a 1,300-page "financial reform" bill, various special interests get language tucked into the bill to help their agendas. However, the unintended consequences can be devastating. And the financial reform bill has more than a few such items. Today, we look briefly at a few innocent paragraphs that could simply kill the job-creation engine of the US. I know that a few Congressmen and even more staffers read my letter, so I hope that someone can fix this. The Wall Street Journal today noted that the bill, while flawed, keeps getting better with each revision. Let's hope that's the case here.

Then I'll comment on the Goldman Sachs indictment. As we all know, there is never just one cockroach. This could be a much bigger story, and understanding some of the details may help you. As an aside, I was writing in late 2006 about the very Collateralized Debt Obligations that are now front and center. There is both more and less to the story than has come out so far. And I'll speculate about how all this could have happened. Let's jump right in.

I wrote about the Dodd bill and its problems last week. But a new problem has surfaced that has major implications for the US economy and our ability to grow it. For all intents and purposes, the bill will utterly devastate angel investing in the US. And as we will see, that is not hyperbole. For a Congress and administration that purports to be all about jobs, this section of the bill makes less than no sense. It is a job and innovation killer of the first order.

First, let's look at a very important part of the US economic machine, the angel investing network. An angel investor, or angel (also known as a business angel or informal investor) is an affluent individual who provides capital for a business startup, usually in exchange for convertible debt or ownership equity. A small but increasing number of angel investors organize themselves into angel groups or angel networks to share research and pool their investment capital.

Angels typically invest their own funds, unlike venture capitalists, who manage the pooled money of others in a professionally managed fund. Although it typically reflects the investment judgment of an individual, the actual entity that provides the funding may be a trust, business, limited liability company, investment fund, etc.

Angel capital fills the gap in startup financing between "friends and family" (sometimes humorously given the acronym FFF, which stands for "friends, family and fools") who provide seed funding, and venture capital. Although it is usually difficult to raise more than a few hundred thousand dollars from friends and family, most traditional venture capital funds are usually not able to consider investments under $1-2 million.

Warren Buffett says buy. Jeremy Grantham says it will get worse. Both are celebrated value investors. Who is right? It all depends upon your view of the third derivative of investing. Today we look at valuations in the stock market. This is the second part of a speech I have given in the past few weeks in California and Stockholm. I am updating the numbers, as the target keeps moving. While from one perspective things look rather difficult, from another there is a ray of hope. What can you expect to earn from stocks over the next five years? It should make for an interesting letter. Note: this will be a little longer than usual, but part of it is there are a LOT of charts.

I should note that I am rewriting this on Monday. For the first time in over 8 years, I missed my Friday night deadline (see below). Last week's title for the letter was "The Economic Blue Screen of Death." By that I referred to the old "blue screen of death" that we used to get on early versions of Microsoft MS-DOS and Windows. You could be working away and suddenly, for no apparent reason, the computer would freeze up and you would get a blue screen. The only thing you could do was unplug the computer and hit the reset button - losing everything that was not saved when the computer crashed.

I likened this to the economic situation we are in now. With consumer spending "resetting" to a new lower level, we are going to have to hit the reset button on many business plans, and thus investments, as consumers are going to spend less and save more. Is that level 3% less? 5%? More? No one knows, but since we have not had a consumer-led recession since 1982, too many businesses assumed that the US consumer, like Superman, was bulletproof.

What will be the eventual savings rate? Will we get back to 7-9% from less than 1%? Maybe, because people are going to realize that savings today are the key to a happy retirement. That would put the new level of consumer spending a good deal lower than it has been. Thankfully, that climb in savings will not happen all at once but will play out over more than a few years. I think we will look back in the middle of the next decade and be quite amazed at how much US personal savings have increased. However, this is the Paradox of Thrift: what is good for the individual is hard on the economy, as by definition increased savings reduces consumer spending.

This week I am in South Africa and am not as connected as I would like to be due to meetings and slow Internet, so we are going to look at some material from my book, Bull's Eye Investing, which I think is more pertinent than ever. And since lately there has been rather large growth in the readership, there are a significant number of new readers for whom this material will be fresh. When I originally wrote much of this, the markets were coming out of the bear phase of 2001-2. I am adding a few comments in [brackets]. I trust you will find value as we look at the problems that investors face in the struggle to maximize portfolio value.

Like all the children from Lake Wobegon, I am sure all my readers are above-average investors. But I am also sure you have friends who are not, so in this chapter we will look at the reasons why they fail at investing, and how they should analyze funds and determine risk. Hopefully this will give you some ways to help them. I will show you a simple way to put yourself in the top 20% of investors. This should make it easier to go to family reunions and listen to your brother-in-law's stories.

A big part of successful Bull's Eye Investing is simply avoiding the mistakes that the large majority of investors make. I can give you all the techniques, trading tips, fund recommendations, forecasts, and so on; but you must still keep away from the patterns which are typical of failed investors.

The economy created 215,000 new jobs in November. A paltry 11,000 were manufacturing. Is that good enough? In previous recoveries we would have been seeing jobs created at a much higher level. But that number is not quite the story. Actually, we saw 4,586,000 new hires in November. That is not a typo. The reality of employment in the US is quite a bit different than the employment numbers often suggest. We look at a relatively new database that sheds some very interesting light on how amazingly dynamic the job market in the US is.

I write this week's letter as I fly from Toronto to Miami. It will be a little shorter than a regular letter, but I also include a chapter from Just One Thing. It is Dennis Gartman's Rules of Trading. I saw Dennis briefly last night, as we were both speaking at an RBC (Royal Bank of Canada) conference, and was reminded after a few of his great stories of just what a really smart trader he is. For those new to this letter, Just One Thing is my latest book which features the writing of 11 of my friends and your humble analyst writing about the one thing we find most important that we have learned in our careers. You won't find stock tips or the latest how-to-turn a thousand into a million in five easy lessons, but you will get solid philosophical grounding on the basic principles of economics and investing from a group of really smart, successful guys (and then my musings as well). You can get your copy at your local bookstore or go to Amazon at www.amazon.com/justonething.

"Our analysis leads us to believe that recovery is only sound if it does come from itself. For any revival which is merely due to artificial stimulus leaves part of the work of depression undone and adds, to an undigested remnant of maladjustments, new maladjustments of its own." -- Joseph Schumpeter

How do we interpret the words of Schumpeter? Is the Austrian School of Economics right? Should the Federal Reserve have allowed the US (and thus the world) to go into a deep recession in 2001-02? Did we just postpone a Day of Reckoning only to have one in the future which will be even worse? What about gold? We look at these questions and more as we continue looking at the "debate" between the gentleman from GaveKal and Bill Bonner and Addison Wiggin.

Is being lazy the secret key to riches? Can you grow your portfolio 2,000 percent with just one decisions? Did I spend 432 pages and 200 footnotes [in Bull's Eye Investing] trying to give readers the tools they need to be thoughtful, successful investors when just one page with no troublesome research would open up to them the secret of the ages? With all my study, how could I miss such wisdom?

Today we explore the problem with "single derivative" thinking. It is in my experience perhaps the single biggest mistake investors make. We enter full-tilt, no-holds-barred into the debate as to whether you should mindlessly buy and hold, or whether you should apply some more thoughtful criteria to your investments and retirement portfolios. This is one of the most critical issues with which investors have to deal. Along the way I will explode a few well-worn Wall Street myths, tell you when it will be safe to get back into the water of the S&P 500 (yes, that day will come) and give you some of the more interesting set of statistics I have come across in four years.

This week we look at how to make you a top 20% investor, think about some of the mistakes we all make and much more. I am writing today in Florida and will finish up in Texas tonight before taking off for Philadelphia. Because of the time constraint on my usual research, I am going to borrow a few pages from Bull's Eye Investing and some letters written last year and add a few thoughts. I think this letter contains some very important points that are worth repeating. If you would like more on this line, you can go to chapters 15 and 17 in Bull's Eye Investing (see below how to get a 32% discount.)

I should note that I have just finished a new (free) Accredited Investor E-letter which will be sent out within a few weeks. It has been some time since I have written one, but I am now committed to getting one a month out. I apologize to those who have signed up for the letter and have not gotten one for months. No more apologies, just copy will be my future motto.

This week we look at a thoughtful analysis by one of my long time favorite analysts, Jeremy Grantham, on what stock market returns should be over the next seven years, comment on the employment numbers and a softening economy and explore what that could mean to our investment portfolios. If we have enough space I will add a few thoughts on the Fed meeting next week.

But first, I would like to thank the people responsible for the enthusiastic and very kind reviews at Amazon.com for Bull's Eye Investing that were posted while I was on vacation (well, OK, one guy just plainly doesn't get it, but you can't please everyone).

This week we re-visit one of my favorite themes: Why Investors Fail. I am doing the final edits on my book, Bull's Eye Investing, and when I came to the chapters on the psychological hard-wiring we have as humans, which causes us to make the same investment mistakes over and over, it just reminded me how important it is to understand why we do the things we do, and then stop doing them!

Insanity, my bride tells me again and again, is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. This week we return to the concept of Bringing Out Your Inner Spock. We look at four more reasons why our psychological make-up makes us prone to making major investment mistakes. For those who missed it, I discussed one of them with Ron Insana and Sue Herera on CNBC yesterday afternoon. They invited me over to their spiffy new studios for some on air chat time about the markets. Hopefully next time I will know in advance and alert you.