Top Stocks For 2011, Top Stocks To Buy, Best Stock Investments For 2011, Hot Stocks For 2011

Editor Zach Scheidt is sitting in today for Adam Lass, who's on vacation. Adam will be back on Thursday. But in the meantime, please check out Zach's look into today's "Global Cash War" and what it means to your portfolio.

In the current global cash war, many less-than-savvy investors are likely to see the true value of their hard-earned capital diminish. Unfortunately, most will never know the difference because the nominal value of their investment accounts may remain stable.

But in the end, the true value of a nest egg lies in the purchasing power of that capital. What if your investment account grows in dollars but fails to grow in value? Does your investment strategy include a plan to grow the real value of your retirement dollars even while the global cash war diminishes the purchasing power of paper currencies?

The Problem With Paper Currencies

If you've been following any of the commentary from our editors over the past several months, you know that a number of us are concerned with the prospects for paper currencies (including not only the U.S. dollar but a number of other global currencies as well).

Think back for a moment to 2005, at the height of the U.S. real estate bubble.

When the house down the street was snatched under contract within hours of being on the market, for five times what the owner paid just a few years before. When the banks were handing out mortgages like they were free toasters. When Ma and Pa turned into house- flipping overnight millionaires. When everyone was living high on the proverbial hog.

If I had told you then that in just a few short years - on Sept. 16, to be precise - the big banking giants like Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, AIG and Merrill Lynch would come crashing down all at once... would you have believed me? If I had insisted that in one fell swoop, a banking-induced global economic crisis would reach pandemic proportions and would prompt the IMF to warn the world hindered on "brink of systemic meltdown"?

How about if I had told you in 2007 that next year Treasury rates would actually turn negative... that the U.S. automarket would siphon billions in bailouts from the government... or that we'd see triple-digit oil prices?

More recently, what if I'd said to you on May 5, 2010, that the next day the market would take a devastating 1,000-point dive for seemingly no reason?

 am writing today to explain how even just a small stake can turn quite large over the next 12 months, or so.

If your trading fund is $1,000, you can turn it into $10,000. If you start with $10,000, you can grow it into $100,000.

I target a 10-to-1 return over time, but in truth, people often suggest their returns have been much higher than that.

They all started like you – reading a message from me… taking a small leap of faith to try trading my way… and then reaping quite spectacular trading profits, leading to unsolicited comments like these:

In the past two weeks, we’ve received two very important developments in the fight against Alzheimer’s disease — one good, one bad.

I’ll begin with the bad.

On Tuesday, drug giant Eli Lilly announced it was halting development of its late-stage Alzheimer’s drug, Semagacestat.

According to Lilly's press release: “Patients taking Semagacestat saw their cognition, or memory and reasoning skills, and their ability to complete daily living activities like getting dressed worsen ‘to a statistically significantly greater degree’ than patients taking a placebo.”

The Dow was flat yesterday. Gold rose $9 to $1,226.

Has the dip in gold already come and gone?

We were expecting lower stock prices...and lower gold prices too. Both went down earlier in the summer. But neither went down as much as we expected...nor stayed down.

But it's still fairly early in this correction. The recession began at the end of '07. We're now approaching the last quarter of '10.

By this time in the '30s, top stocks were hitting rock bottom. The market crashed in the autumn of '29...then bounced...and then started down again. It didn't stop until it hit bottom in July of '32 - nearly three years later. By then, top stocks had lost nearly 90% of their value, from 381down to 41.

It can take longer, however. Japanese stocks crashed in '90. But they didn't hit their ultimate bottom until 2008 - 18 years later - with losses of about 90%.