Investment seminar pitches bristle in areas with large populations of retirees, and regulators are warning seniors to be leery. A probe of the meetings has uncovered high-pressure sales pitches for undesirable products, misleading claims and even outright fraud, federal, state and securities-industry regulators said recently at a "seniors summit" on investment fraud. The Securities and Exchange Commission found abusive sales practices with the North American Securities Administrators Association, which represents state securities regulators. This is a report from AARP, the advocacy group for seniors and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, the securities industry's self-policing organization.
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For retirees deciding on an investment mix can be difficult. How you diversify, and how much you decide to put into each type of investment is called asset allocation. For example, if you decide to invest in stocks, how much of your retirement nest egg should you put into stocks: 10 percent … 30 percent … 75 percent? How much into bonds and cash? Your decision will depend on many factors including how much time you have until retirement if you have not already retired. Also, even if retired consider our life expectancy, the size of your current nest egg, other sources of retirement income, how much risk you are willing to take, and how healthy your current financial picture is, among others.
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After you have retired you may want to change your investment mix. Your needs as a retiree will be different and since you have invested your money over a period time some of your investments will have go up and others will have gone down. If this continues, you may eventually have a different investment mix than you intended. Reassessing your mix, or rebalancing as it is commonly called, brings your portfolio to fit your personal retirement plan. Rebalancing also helps you to make logical, not emotional, investment decisions. For instance, instead of selling investments in a sector that is declining, you would sell an investment that has made gains and, with that money, purchase more in the declining investment sector. This way, you rebalance your portfolio mix, lessen your risk of loss, and increase you chance for greater returns in the long run.
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There are two main ways for retirees to reduce risk. First, diversify within each category of investment. You can do this by investing in pooled arrangements, such as mutual funds, index funds, and bank products offered by reliable professionals. Some retired people want to be "stock pickers" and this can endanger your retirment funds. On the other hand pooled investments typically give you a small share of different individual investments and will allow you to spread your money among many stocks, bonds, and other financial instruments, even if you don’t have a lot of money to invest. Your risk of losing money is less than if you buy shares in only a few individual companies. Distributing your investments in this way is called diversification.
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Here are ten golden rules of investing from Peter Lynch, the retired manager of Fidelity Investments’ Magellan Fund, which soared in value during his tenure and beat the average equity fund every year he was at the helm.

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