Investors

If all goes as planned, sometime this morning a spacecraft will blast off from its launchpad in Cape Canaveral, Fla., and ride a fiery plume of contrails upward through the pre-dawn darkness to begin a two-week journey to the International Space Station and back. But the flight won't be just another NASA resupply mission. Instead, the Falcon 9 rocket and its unmanned Dragon cargo capsule built by Space Exploration Technologies Corporation - SpaceX for short - will be the first commercially owned and operated vehicle ever to rendezvous with the station's orbiting astronauts.

Marylanders interested in owning thoroughbred horses can purchase shares in six racing investment companies founded by Frank Stronach, the owner of Laurel Park and Pimlico Race Course . The stock offering began earlier this month, allowing investors in several states — including Maryland, California and New York — to own a piece of a thoroughbred for $10 a share. Each company plans to raise revenue by racing its horses until November 2013 and then by selling them. After the sale, the net proceeds would be distributed to shareholders, though the prospectus warns potential investors that owning racehorses involves a "high degree of risk.

Albert Lord doesn't like to wait - not in business or on the golf course. The colorful chairman of student loan behemoth Sallie Mae, who's embroiled in a nasty fight over the failed sale of the company, has spent 40 years in the accounting and banking industries. He said that experience should have instilled in him a measure of patience, but it hasn't. Whether in traffic, at the office or on the links, Lord said, he just doesn't like to wait. He can't do much about the first two, but he's got a sure-fire solution for the last one: He's building his own, an 18-hole golf course on land he's acquired amid shuttered tobacco farms and grazing horses in southern Anne Arundel County.

- Thoroughbred racing is sometimes called the "sport of kings," but the horse owners and prospective owners sipping red wine at a reception the other night seemed too young to have ascended to an exalted level of royalty. Maybe they could symbolically be earls or viscounts. They looked like recent college graduates too old for the bar scene but too young to yet possess the graying, distinguished, moneyed look commonly associated with the sport's elite. But that was the point.

A price war among spice makers resulted in its first major casualties in Maryland yesterday as McCormick & Co. Inc. announced it would close one of its Hunt Valley spice plants and eliminate about 150 of the company's 2,000 jobs in the state.The move, part of a planned 600 job cuts worldwide announced by the Sparks-based company yesterday, comes as competition the spice business has prevented McCormick from meeting its profit goals. McCormick's stock price has also languished, losing 20 percent of its value since the beginning of the year.

Eileen Ambrose's column Sunday about the implications of the recent election for investors doesn't start off very well ( "What a split Congress means for investors," Nov. 7). She says the four major issues are "the deficit, economy, Social Security and Medicare. " I'll grant her "the economy" but the other three are just the same tired old right-wing Republican shibboleths — non-issues if we got the economy right, really. (Well, genuine health care reform would have helped Medicare.

The 2000s were that type of decade for investors as the stock market showed its fickle ways, brutalizing investors in two bear markets, then turning sweet when a rally seemed hard to believe. Through it all, investors wrestled with choices: fleeing to safety, hunting for a mutual fund they thought they could trust or trying to recover from losses. Now, said Morningstar Inc. director of mutual fund research Russel Kinnel, it's clear there was a lot of churn that didn't take investors far. "People's market timing was very poor," he said.

Derek Gabbard wasn't dreaming of California when he sought to raise investment capital for his Baltimore-based cybersecurity firm. But the CEO of Lookingglass Cyber Solutions lucked out with a connection to venture capitalists in the state that dwarfs all others in terms of venture capital. With a San Francisco investment firm taking the lead on the investment and a Maryland firm following, Gabbard recently raised $5 million. Such deals, where Mid-Atlantic technology companies straddle both coasts for investors, have been cropping up lately, though the dynamics underlying them vary.

CHAINSAW Al is gone, leaving many people who believed in him a lot poorer than they were before. Albert J. Dunlap was chairman of Sunbeam Corp. He belonged to the let's-crack-heads school of corporate management. During his stint at Sunbeam and before that at Scott Paper, he laid off at least 23,000 workers. Many American corporate executives have dismissed large numbers of employees, but what made Chainsaw special is that he did it all with great relish. Calling himself "Rambo in pinstripes," Mr. Dunlap tirelessly promoted his book, "Mean Business."

StraighterLine, a Baltimore-based online college education startup, expects to announce Friday that it raised $10 million from venture capital firms to market and grow its business. The company's student enrollment this year was about 1,500 students, and it expects to enroll 4,500 students over the next year. StraighterLine employs 11 people and plans to grow to more than 20 employees over the next 12 months, said Burck Smith, the company's chief executive officer and founder. The company offers online college courses for credit through a $99-a-month subscription model, an approach the company says is a response to the escalating cost of college education.

My first memories of The Baltimore Sun go back to 1982, when my wife and I were planning to move to Baltimore from Massachusetts. In the days before the Internet, home buyers turned to The Sun 's classified ads to get their arms around the range of housing alternatives. Thirty years ago was not only a time when The Sun 's real estate section was the go-to source for home listings, but it was also a time of low-teens mortgage rates and a housing crisis (albeit not quite as bad as our most recent crisis)

T. Rowe Price Group closed its high-yield bond funds to new investors as of Monday, the Baltimore money manager announced Tuesday. They include the investor class shares and advisor class shares of the $9.2 billion High Yield Fund as well as the $2.5 billion Institutional High Yield Fund. While Price will not accept new investors, existing shareholders can continue to invest in the funds. The funds were last closed in February 2004 and reopened three years ago. Investors have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into both funds in the last year.

Could crowdfunding work for entrepreneurs who need capital for their private startup and are willing to sell a stake in it to the masses? Congress seems to think so. Charities and artists successfully raise money for their causes via crowdfunding, a method of soliciting hundreds or thousands of small donations over the Internet. Could it work for entrepreneurs who need capital for their startup and are willing to sell a stake in it to the masses? Congress seems to think so. The bipartisan Jumpstart Our Business Startups — or JOBS — Act loosens restrictions so business can more easily raise capital and, it's hoped, create jobs.

StraighterLine, a Baltimore-based online college education startup, expects to announce Friday that it raised $10 million from venture capital firms to market and grow its business. The company's student enrollment this year was about 1,500 students, and it expects to enroll 4,500 students over the next year. StraighterLine employs 11 people and plans to grow to more than 20 employees over the next 12 months, said Burck Smith, the company's chief executive officer and founder. The company offers online college courses for credit through a $99-a-month subscription model, an approach the company says is a response to the escalating cost of college education.

Shirley M. Boyer, a well-known Anne Arundel County real estate investor and former bank director, died Thursday of cancer at her Severna Park home. She was 75. A daughter of farmers, the former Shirley Milhausen was born in Baltimore and raised on the family farm on Kinder Road in Millersville, which is now Severna Park. She was a 1954 graduate of Glen Burnie High School and a year earlier, had married her husband, Harold G. "Bud" Boyer, a master electrician. Mrs. Boyer was a real estate investor and owned many properties in Anne Arundel County.

Give anyone age 40 and older a time machine and they would likely go back to their early 20s — to open an IRA. That's because by 40, many of us have learned the miracle of compound earnings over time. We kick ourselves for not socking away even tiny sums in a tax-sheltered individual retirement account when we were younger. Consider the math: A 22-year-old who invests $100 a month in an IRA for 10 years and then stops will end up with more money at age 65 than a 32-year-old who saves $100 a month in an IRA for 33 years.

Investment guru Peter Lynch once advised ordinary folks to "invest in what you know. " For many small investors, some of the companies they are most familiar with are the e-commerce and social media sites they use every day. Now some of these private Internet companies, such as Facebook, are expected to go public this year or next and will likely attract a rush of fans to their stocks. But even if you feel like you know these companies well, there is a risk in investing in them.

Veteran money manager Brian Kroneberger Jr. didn't sleep well last week — and neither did his clients — as markets whipsawed and the Dow Jones industrial average posted Tums-popping losses and heart-pounding gains on a daily basis. Nervous clients phoned incessantly, he attended frequent meetings to discuss developments, and investors emailed him in the middle of the night, apparently unable to sleep and seeking advice. Do we sell now? Do we move it all to CDs? Is this a buying opportunity?

Apple made headlines again last week, but this time they weren't entirely about the new iPad. The tech behemoth announced that it would start paying a quarterly dividend worth $2.65 per share beginning in July. That amounts to nearly $10 billion to be paid out in the first year alone. "Apple is the leader here," says Howard Silverblatt, senior index analyst with Standard & Poor's, who adds that the company will put pressure on other technology firms to start paying dividends.