Does this sound familiar? You’ve committed to reducing your household’s environmental impact by recycling as much as possible, composting food waste, taking reusable bags to the grocery store and avoiding Styrofoam like the plague. You regularly donate to local food banks and secondhand clothing and home goods stores. Around the holidays, you select a few local community organizations to which you give your time and a monetary gift. Then, upon a year-end review of your investments, you realize with horror that you’re investing your money in companies with which you wouldn’t consider having personal, face-to-face interactions due to their social, environmental, or political impact. With a sinking feeling, you realize that the values by which you live your life aren’t reflected in the way you invest. Ouch. Don’t despair. You’re not alone, and more important, the investment community is listening and responding! Pressure on publicly traded companies has increased exponentially in recent years as more investors learn about and react with consternation to the business practices of domestic, international and global firms. In addition, the last two decades have seen developers of mainstream investment products create a much wider lineup of socially responsible options designed to screen out companies who don’t meet a variety of characteristics. The number of mutual funds sporting a socially responsible mandate are estimated to have grown from about 50 in 1995 to more than 500 by 2012. That’s good news, because in a recent survey completed by TIAA-CREF Asset Management, 64% of survey respondents stated that they were interested in starting to invest, or investing more, in socially responsible products. It’s a significant indication of the interest of investors in better aligning their portfolios with their personal beliefs.

In clear, simple prose, Belsky and Gilovich explain some of the most common quirks that cause people to make foolish financial decisions. If you read this book, you should be able to recognize most of them in yourself and have a fighting chance of counteracting some of them. Otherwise, you will end up learning about your cognitive shortcomings the hard way: at the Wall Street campus of the School of Hard Knocks. The late polymath Peter Bernstein poured a long lifetime of erudition and insight into this intellectual history of risk, luck, probability and the problems of trying to forecast what the future holds. Combining a stupendous depth of research with some of the most elegant prose ever written about finance, Bernstein chronicles the halting human march toward a better understanding of risk—and reminds us that, after centuries of progress, we still have a long way to go. The founder of the Vanguard Group and father of the index-fund industry methodically sorts fact from fiction. Following his logical arguments can benefit you even if you never invest in a mutual fund, since Bogle touches on just about every crucial aspect of investing, including taxes, trading costs, diversification, performance measurement and the power of patience. Neither light reading nor cheap (it’s hard to find online for less than about $75), this book is the most thoughtful and objective analysis of the long-term returns on stocks, bonds, cash and inflation available anywhere, purged of the pom-pom waving and statistical biases that contaminate other books on the subject. The sober conclusion here: Stocks are likely, although not certain, to be the highest-performing asset over the long run.

Every industry has its own language, and the world of annuities is no different. However, the word games used in the annuity sales process sometimes turns into a semantic nightmare where you think you own something that you really don't. Make sure that doesn't happen to you. Know the real definitions of the sometimes confusing annuity language. An income rider is an attached benefit to a deferred annuity that guarantees income at a future date. It is not yield. An income rider is typically a separate calculation from the accumulation value and cannot be transferred, or cashed in lump sum. You also cannot peel off the high income rider interest, and can only use it for income. It's monopoly money otherwise. There is no free money, and no annuity company is giving away anything. Buying an annuity for the bonus is like buying a car for the stereo system. This is agent candy for the uninformed annuity buying masses. Upfront bonuses are just part of the overall contractual guaranteed calculations, and isn't too good to be true. This is a separate calculation on some deferred annuity policies that insures you will at least get back more money than you put in if you hold the contract through the surrender period. With most policies, it doesn't mean that you get this guaranteed percentage plus potential growth on top of that floor.

OPEC has ceded no ground to competitors, including American shale. But the group will be bruised as many of its member countries face prices below break-even budgets, with oil at around $70 a barrel, Dan K. Eberhart, chief executive of U.S. oil field services company Canary LLC said. However, U.S. drillers can expand oil production in the face of falling oil prices as they have become more efficient at coaxing energy from tight rocks, Eberhart said at the OSEA 2014 energy conference in Singapore. "In an amazing feat of engineering and economics, lift costs have been driven down as much as $30 per barrel since 2012," he said. Lift cost is the cost of bringing oil to the surface from its source. Meanwhile, some analysts have cautioned against assuming that oil prices have found a bottom. "Without a bullish fundamental shock to help the market make and sustain a V-shaped price recovery, we’d want to see a more thorough confirmation of a technical base of support before declaring that anything more than the latest trading bottom has been established," said Tim Evans, energy futures specialist for Citi, in a note late Monday.

As the year winds down, it's natural to take stock of which investments were leaders and which were laggards in 2014. It's also timely to look ahead at 2015 and try to discern what will be the best and worst investment ideas then. This year, U.S. stocks have thrived, despite a correction in September and October, boosted by strong earnings growth and continued monetary stimulus from the Federal Reserve. The Standard & Poor's 500 index generated a total return of 10.35 percent year to date through Nov. 14. Bonds have been a surprise winner, with the Barclays Aggregate U.S. bond index generating a return of 5.19 percent during that period. Meanwhile, gold and oil have slumped, with the former dropping 1.8 percent, according to Bloomberg, and the latter (U.S. WTI prices) falling 18.2 percent. As for next year, all eyes will be on the Fed to see if and when it will begin to raise interest rates. Investment experts are bullish on international stocks, U.S. small-cap stocks, master limited partnerships and liquid alternative strategies and bearish on Treasury bonds, gold and high-yield, fixed-income investments.