You know you need to invest for retirement, but the best approach is not always clear. MarketRiders guides you through the noise with a simple interactive questionnaire that helps us determine the optimal mix of investments for you. This is how high-priced advisers operate, but we don't charge you an arm and a leg like they do.

MarketRiders will never advise you to chase a hot stock tip in your retirement portfolio. In fact, we won't advise you to pick individual stocks at all. Instead, we'll suggest a portfolio of entire markets: US stocks, bonds, foreign and emerging market stocks, commodities, and real estate. These are called asset classes.

Yale University found that 90% of investment returns came from the markets where money managers invested, while less than 10% came from the individual stocks they bought and the timing of buying and selling investments. Most professional money managers seem to want to fight over the 10%, while MarketRiders (and the world's smartest investors) believes in optimizing around the 90%.

Owning a portfolio full of American companies is ok, but when the U.S. economy takes a hit all of your stocks are likely to follow suit. If you owned bonds or commodities like oil and gold in addition to your stocks, when one type of investment didn't perform well other ones likely would.

The chart to the right demonstrates that every year, some markets win and others lose and, unfortunately, no expert can predict the future. So MarketRiders answer is simple - protect your retirement by owning the right mix of all of them!

P.S. Click the chart to see additional years of returns by asset class.