Online stock trading company – 5 per cent annually (in 1950, the year of the Korean invasion, the index was only 102.

8). Long-term inflationary trends also accounted for much of the advocacy of the purchase of common stocks and investment company shares in recent years. Pitted against the sale of variable annuities by life insurance companies is the nation's largest mutual life insurance company, the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. Its position is that under standard forms of contracts issued by life insurance companies the company assumes the risk. Under a variable annuity contract, however, the risk is transferred to the purchaser, a practice completely contrary to the traditional philosophy of the life insurance industry. The confidence in life insurance so carefully nurtured over the years and so priceless an asset, it is contended, might be seriously impaired in the event of a protracted decline in common stock prices.

Not more than 25
per cent of the company's assets may be invested in the securi
ties of any one issuer, or of two or more issuers which the tax
payer controls and which are engaged in the same, similar, or
related business.