What the experts say

Closed-end funds, closeout prices

Don’t worry if you didn’t double down when the stock market hit bottom, said John Waggoner in USA Today. There are still bargains on Wall Street, and “the easiest to find are in closed-end mutual funds.” These funds are professionally managed portfolios of stocks and bonds that, like stocks, issue a fixed number of shares. “Think of a closed-end fund as a corporation whose business is buying and selling stocks.” Oddly, shares in these funds tend to sell for less than the value of their assets per share—and that’s definitely the case right now. The average discount for a closed-end fund is currently about ­

8 percent, as opposed to 4 percent histor­ically, according to The Investor’s Guide to Closed-End Funds. Of course, some funds are deeply discounted for a reason—so “choose your picks carefully.”

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Wanted: Housesitters

The housing downturn has sparked demand for live-in “home stagers,” said Kara Morrison in The Arizona Republic. Houses that sit empty attract vandals and varmints—no small part of the reason they often take longer to sell. One solution is to hire a house “tender,” who, in exchange for cheap rent, promises to keep the place in tiptop shape until it sells. For the sitters, this can be a pretty sweet gig. “If I have 10 homes available, I will get 100 calls a day,” says Cyndee Bezik, co-owner of HomeTenders of America, a Scottsdale, Ariz., company that screens, trains, and places housesitters. Of course, sellers aren’t going to hand over the keys to just anyone. The best candidates are neat freaks with good taste who don’t mind showing the house on a moment’s notice—yet are carefree enough to pack up and move out when their service ends in a sale.

Fuel for your portfolio

Energy companies have recently uncovered a treasure trove of natural gas “gushing” thousands of feet below U.S. soil, said Steven Goldberg in Kiplinger.com. “Enormous fields of shale gas” have been identified across the South, as well as in New York and Pennsylvania. “It’s a real big deal—there’s a lot of gas there,” says Gary Long, a petroleum engineer with the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Natural gas itself is not necessarily a great investment: The recession, not to mention the new supply of gas, has cut prices by a third from their highs of last summer, to just $4 per million British thermal units. But investors can still profit from these discoveries by buying stock in the companies that find and extract gas. Southwestern Energy and XTO Energy are two stocks worth exploring.