Latinos In America

By STEPHANIE SIMON

Entrepreneur Rob Israel believes he has found a winning recipe.

The founder of Doc Popcorn, which sells fresh-popped snacks in flavors such as “sinfully cinnamon” and “hoppin’ jalapeno,” has supervised the opening of 54 franchise outlets in five years and says he is working with another 200 in development.

Matt Nager for The Wall Street Journal

Doc Popcorn franchisees can open full-scale stores, mall kiosks or mobile carts. Above, founder Rob Israel in Denver on Tuesday.

Mr. Israel would like to credit his product’s popularity for the steady growth. But he also attributes his success to a flexible franchise system that allows local entrepreneurs to buy into the brand at a level that fits their budget. Franchisees can open a full-scale store for an investment of up to $150,000, or they can opt for a mall kiosk at a cost of about $100,000. A mobile cart requires an initial investment of about $70,000.

“It’s efficient, very simple and affordable,” Mr. Israel says.

It’s also a fast-growing trend in the franchise world.

Franchise consultants say they are seeing more corporations offering potential investors an array of business models, at different price points. In an era where credit is tight and investors are cautious, both franchisers and franchisees say this type of flexibility is the key to expansion.

“Many investors have difficulty finding credit to build out full-size stores,” says Steve Caldeira, president of the International Franchise Association, a trade group. “There has been an explosion of different franchise models within the same brand.”

Huntington Learning Center, a tutoring service, recently began offering prospective franchisees two tiers of investment. For a franchise fee of $10,000 (plus build-out expenses and a 9.5% royalty fee), investors could open a “standard” tutoring center in a retail space of about 1,200 square feet. For a franchise fee of $59,000—and a lower, 8% royalty—they could open an “expanded” center, with more room to tutor not just in the traditional subjects of math and reading, but also in science and other academic fields.

“This has not been a strong year for us in terms of new sales,” says Raymond Huntington, the company’s chairman, who attributes the slump to tough competition in the tutoring industry, tight credit and the shaky economy. He hopes the lower up-front costs of the standard option will encourage more entrepreneurs to give the Huntington brand a try.

For franchisers, one risk of the tiered model is losing control of the brand image. A successful company will take the time to spell out precise standards for customer interaction, product presentation and corporate oversight—and do this well before launching a new business model, says Benjamin Litalien, who runs the consulting firm Franchise Well LLC.

Franchisers likely already have detailed standards for lighting, signage, product display and sales patter in a traditional store, but those rules don’t necessarily translate well to a mall kiosk or a food truck, Mr. Litalien says.

When the truck is emblazoned with the brand name, everything from how the driver navigates traffic to where he pulls over to sell his wares can affect the product’s image.

Mr. Litalien also warns franchisers to think through the implications of new formats on loyal, long-time franchisees. Someone who has invested $500,000 in building a standalone donut shop may not be pleased to see a rival selling the same brand from an inexpensive mobile cart, especially if they compete for the same customer base.

Prospective franchisees, meanwhile, should take a hard look at whether corporate executives have the expertise to help them pioneer a new means of reaching customers, Mr. Litalien says. “They may not have the field support,” he says.

Nazrul Islam says he recognizes the risks but was still happy to hear that a food vendor he enjoys, BannaStrow’s Crepes and Coffee, was offering a tiered franchise system that let him choose whether to launch with a food truck, a kiosk, a food-court counter or a traditional restaurant.

Mr. Islam found a location he liked at the entrance to a mall food court in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., invested more than $200,000 and recently opened for business. “In the economic downturn, I thought it was better to open in a mall,” at a location with heavy foot traffic, he says.

Doc Popcorn franchisee Nate Godo also started small, with a mobile cart that he wheeled to events at the convention center in his hometown of Knoxville, Tenn., in 2010. Retail sales were new to Mr. Godo; he had spent his career up to that point managing an automotive business. So he wasn’t about to invest a fortune in popcorn without first testing out the viability on a small scale, he says.

Mr. Godo’s mobile cart did so well that he moved into the popcorn business full-time a year ago; he recently stationed a second cart in a local mall.

He likes the way the tiered system “allows me to gradually ramp up,” he says.

Write to
Smalltalk@wsj.com

By JESSICA C. WAKEMAN

While talk of employment growth has been circulating for the last several months and experts expect Friday’s unemployment report to show job gains for the second month in a row, another group of key players say they plan to add jobs in 2010.

According to the Society for Human Resources Management, 35% of the 1,625 employers who responded to a March survey say they expect to add full-time workers in 2010, more than double last year’s 16% of respondents who said their firms would add staff.

The increase might be a reflection of a renewed sense of calm about the business climate, experts say.

“Many organizations have a sense that the market is improving, giving them the confidence they need to start rebuilding,” said John Dooney, SHRM’s manager of strategic research.

One firm adding employees now is Bank of America

which has 6,000 open positions spanning human resources to investment banking, says Kelly E. Sapp, a spokeswoman for Bank of America. She says that the company has more than doubled the size of its intern program and also doubled graduate hiring over 2009, a shift she attributes to business need and growth from acquisitions.

iStock Photo

Friday’s job report is expected to show job growth.

Mark Anderson, president of ExecuNet, a network for business leaders providing recruiting, research and advice, says that recruiters and companies have been talking about the improving market for the last six months–and now companies are finally acting on those feelings by filling in the talent gaps left behind by layoffs and hiring freezes.

“One thing businesses do not like is uncertainity and now that things are starting to look positive, companies feel that they can add positions instead of trading up,” said Mr. Anderson.

ExecuNet’s own May benchmark Recruiter Confidence Index, a monthly survey that measures the executive job market, shows 65% of 185 responding executive recruiters are “confident” or “very confident” that the executive employment market will improve over the next six months, making May 2010 the second consecutive month that index remained over 60% since June 2008.

The SHRM report showed that 52% of professional, scientific and technical services firms will add jobs, up from 21% in 2009. Some 43% of high-tech companies also plan to add jobs.

And Mr. Dooney says that the report also shows salary freezes are being lifted and fewer employers expect to make layoffs in 2010 than in the last two years. On average across all industries, salaries are expected to rise 2.2 percent in 2010, the report showed.

Por DINNY MCMAHON en Taiyuan, China

Miao Lingquan costumava pagar os agricultores de pimenta que compareciam em massa à frente da sua porta no tempo de colheita com dinheiro guardado em caixas empilhadas até a altura da sua cintura. Mas agora o escritório do empreendedor, que faz pasta de pimenta do tipo malagueta para exportar para o Japão, está surpreendentemente vazio.

No ano passado, Miao começou a comprar todas as pimentas usando uma linha de telefone fixa que o Banco Agrícola da China, o AgBank, deu a ele. O telefone de cor verde garrafa lê cartões de banco e pode processar pagamentos.

“É mais rápido e mais conveniente para os clientes e promove a segurança pública”, disse Miao, observando um fornecedor que tinha dirigido por seis horas para trazer suas pimentas de uma província vizinha passar seu cartão para aprovar a transferência de 70 mil yuans (US$ 11.200) para a sua conta bancária. “Você não corre o risco de ser esfaqueado por causa do seu dinheiro.”

O interior da China carece há muito tempo de serviços financeiros básicos, com os bancos se recusando a construir agências em áreas menos desenvolvidas. A consequência é que os agricultores chineses e os negócios rurais estão famintos por crédito, o que retarda o crescimento econômico das áreas mais pobres da China.

O AgBank, o terceiro maior banco da China em valor de ativos, espera mudar isso colocando em marcha um sistema eletrônico de pagamentos em partes da economia chinesa que são completamente baseadas em dinheiro vivo. A meta é atingir clientes que estão horas de distância da agência bancária mais próxima — e uma vez que estejam conectados ao sistema financeiro, promover a concessão de crédito.

A chave tem sido a distribuição gratuita de “telefones de transferência” nos vilarejos do país, uma inovadora fusão entre um telefone normal e uma máquina de ponto de venda usada para processar pagamentos com cartões de bancos. Eles parecem telefones normais, exceto por um sulco em um dos lados para passar os cartões, o rolo de papel dos recibos empoleirado no topo e a pequena tela de LCD usada para a navegação do processo de transação.

O AgBank começou a provar informalmente seu telefone nas áreas rurais em 2008, cinco anos após ele ter sido originalmente desenvolvido por uma divisão urbana do banco. O banco distribuiu mais de 1,47 milhão de telefones para áreas rurais até o fim de junho do ano passado.

Para empreendedores como Miao, o equipamento permite pagar rapidamente fornecedores e ser pago pelos compradores. Para as famílias rurais, os telefones permitem que os pais remetam fundos para os estudantes que se mudaram para cidades afastadas em busca de educação sem ter de fazer uma viagem até o banco — e para trabalhadores migrantes enviarem regularmente dinheiro para casa. 

Os telefones também permitem que as pessoas acessem seu dinheiro quando for conveniente — estabelecimentos com esses telefones podem oferecer dinheiro de volta como ocorre em qualquer supermercado do ocidente — ao invés de guardá-lo todo debaixo do colchão. 

Outras companhias em economias em desenvolvimento têm evitado a necessidade de instalar infraestrutura física para pagamentos em áreas rurais ao usar SMS, serviços de mensagens curtas, em telefones celulares. Mas o pagamento via celular tem demorado para decolar na China.

Quando o AgBank começou primeiro a instalar sua rede de telefones em áreas rurais, o pagamento bancário via celular estava ainda engatinhando na China e a segurança dos pagamentos era a maior preocupação. A regulamentação chinesa tinha também restringido instituições não financeiras de oferecer serviços bancários, o que significa que companhias como as de telecomunicações — que têm sido fundamentais na condução do serviços bancários móveis em outros países em desenvolvimento — não estavam envolvidas na concepção inicial das soluções financeiras para a zona rural.

A consultoria McKinsey & Co. estimou o volume total bruto das transações na China via pagamentos por celular em cerca de US$ 9 bilhões em 2012, ante US$ 2 bilhões em 2010. É um valor pequenino comparado aos US$ 716 bilhões em transações realizadas via telefone fixo pelo AgBank durante a primeira metade de 2012.

O banco distribui o telefone gratuitamente para os clientes rurais e não cobra pelas transações. O AgBank espera que os telefones ajudem a gerar receita ao fornecer uma base para a concessão de mais crédito para as áreas rurais.

Betty Wilkinson, uma especialista em finanças do departamento da Ásia Oriental do Banco de Desenvolvimento da Ásia, diz que a medida real do sucesso dos telefones será se o volume de empréstimos para as áreas rurais aumentar uma vez que a infra-estrutura seja instalada.

“O que o AgBank está fazendo não é um pré-requisito para o sucesso das atividades bancárias [na China] rural, mas é um passo técnico crítico para a frente”, diz.

(Colaborou Paul Mozur.)

By DIANA MIDDLETON

Since the start of the recession, employees say they are too fearful or too discouraged to seek new opportunities. As a result, they are entrenched in their positions and have given up looking for higher pay or better positions, even within their own firms, according to a study conducted by Towers Watson, a human resources consulting firm. The biennial study, to be released Tuesday, also found that respondents have dramatically lowered their career and retirement aspirations.

“Recession survivors” are a new crop of workers that have restructured their career expectations based on the economy and stagnant work opportunities, Diana Middleton reports on the News Hub.

The findings reflect the attitudes of “recession survivors,” says Max Caldwell, a managing principle at Towers Watson.

Not only are workers cautious about seeking advancement, fewer people are retiring, making any jumps they might want to make more difficult.

The survey polled more than 20,000 employees at midsize and large companies across all industries between November 2009 and January 2010 and asked about everything from their plans to look for other jobs to their retirement expectations.

Some 43% of respondents believe they can only advance if they leave their current job. But 44% say they have no plans to leave their job because stability is more important to them. More than half, 51% felt that there was no clear path toward advancement at their current employer.

Mr. Caldwell says the survey was meant to capture “how the recession impacted employees attitudes.”

That echoes a recent Conference Board report, based on a survey of 5,000 U.S. households which found only 45% of those people were satisfied with their jobs, down from 61% in 1987, the first year in which the survey was conducted.

“We’ve found that since the recession, people are ‘burrowing in,’ ” Mr. Caldwell says. “Instead of looking elsewhere for higher pay or the better position, people are craving stability.”

Meg Montford, a Kansas City, Mo., career coach, says people are also more fearful of looking for outside opportunities. While the job market has improved some, potential job hunters are spooked from seeing friends and family lose their jobs, and instead are staying put, she says.

“Employees are overworked and underappreciated,” Ms. Montford says, adding that in gratitude for even having a job, employees are willing to tolerate more workplace discomfort.

That attitude is damaging to the talent pipeline, because young people aren’t gearing up for—or being trained for—promotions, Mr. Caldwell says.

Some 33% of respondents want to work for one company forever, a figure that surprised Mr. Caldwell and is a sea change from the job-hopping that was a hallmark of the early 2000s.

Dan King, a principal of Career Planning and Management Inc. in Boston says he’s seen more people feeling beleaguered and listless about their careers in the past year. Before the recession, most of his clients were unhappy employees who wanted help nabbing better positions tailored to their skills. Now, they are more likely to be hesitant job seekers who cling to jobs they hate, Mr. King says.

“There’s little recognition for the extra load [employees] are carrying,” says Mr. King.

Towers Watson’s Mr. Caldwell also says that even as the recovery continues, it may be harder for employees to get ahead. That’s because companies are focused on managing labor costs and leveraging flexible staffing models, such as utilizing contractors, Mr. Caldwell says.

“Companies are turning a corner toward recovery, but the recession has had a big psychological impact on workers,” he says. “They’re just holding on.”

Write to Diana Middleton at diana.middleton@wsj.com

By JOANNE KAUFMAN

Dallas

The way Robert Edsel tells the story, it all began in 1997 on the Ponte Vecchio. He’d recently sold his oil-and-gas exploration business for $37 million, and moved to Florence with no grand plan except to find a grand passion.

Zina Saunders

“I’d always been interested in art and architecture, but I’d never had any courses. And I thought, ‘Well, I’m in Florence and there are all these art-history professors, so I should go around and learn about the subject.’ I was reading about 10 books a week because I had the time,” said Mr. Edsel, 56, who’s tall and lean (a former nationally ranked tennis player, he still logs regular court time with his good friend Rod Laver) and has a shock of white hair that he keeps futilely shoving back from his forehead. But what you mostly notice is the intensity. That and the apologetically long answers to any and all questions.

At one point in his tutorial, Mr. Edsel became immersed in “The Rape of Europa,” a chronicle of the Nazis’ looting and theft. “I remember standing on the Ponte Vecchio. I knew I wasn’t a World War II historian, but I knew enough to know that Europe had been beaten to pieces,” he said, sitting at a conference table in his downtown office here. “So if the continent was in shambles, how did all these works of art survive? They didn’t have legs. They didn’t go hide on their own. So I started asking people in Florence, and they all said ‘that’s an amazing question.’”

The onetime oil man has been drilling for answers ever since, first with “Rescuing Da Vinci” (2006), a book of photographs, and then with “The Monuments Men” (2009), an account of a special Allied force—museum directors, curators and conservators—who risked their lives to keep the world’s masterpieces from falling into enemy hands.

A film adaptation of “Monuments Men,” co-written, produced and directed by George Clooney, who also stars with Matt Damon and Cate Blanchett, is due out in December; Mr. Edsel is confident that the movie will give a nice lift to the Monuments Men Foundation for the Preservation of Art, the nonprofit he established half a dozen years ago to safeguard the legacy of his “protagonists” and to help complete their mission of returning stolen treasures to their owners.

And now Mr. Edsel has a new book, “Saving Italy,” a companion volume of sorts to “The Monuments Men.” His original plan was to tell both stories between a single set of covers, “but when I was writing ‘Monuments Men’ and it got to 500, 600, 700 pages it was clear that something had to go.

“By then I understood a lot better the distinction between what the Nazis did in [the rest of] Western Europe—where there were the more targeted thefts from Jews and other collectors—and what they did in Italy. There wasn’t the same mass premeditated looting going on there. But there were severe threats to the art,” he said, among them the Allied bomb that almost destroyed “The Last Supper.”

“In Italy you turn left and you turn right; there’s usually something very old and very important wherever you go.”

Mr. Edsel almost went bankrupt twice in his previous career. Thus, he wasn’t one to be daunted by the historians who initially dismissed him as a rich dilettante, and the publishers who simply dismissed him. “They said: ‘Nobody is going to be interested. It’s an old story.’ And I said, ‘I really think you’re wrong,’” he recalled. Then they said, ‘It’s already been done.’ And I said: ‘Hey, save me from myself. Tell me the name of the book and I’ll stop.’ And of course nobody could.

“I’ve made the mistake many times in my life, in the midst of my exuberance and passion, of thinking because I love something everybody will love it. But from the time I got interested in this over a four- or five-year period, I’d go to lunch or dinner with people and they’d say, ‘What are you working on?’ and I’d tell them for two minutes, and then I’d say, ‘What’s happening with you?’ And they’d say: ‘Forget what’s happening with me. Go back to that story about the salt mines,’ he said, referring to the Nazi repositories for the safekeeping of stolen treasures by the likes of Rembrandt, Rubens and Vermeer.

“I believe everyone has a connection to this story,” said Mr. Edsel, who lectures frequently, customizing his talks for the occasion. When, for example, he’s addressing Jewish audiences, he’ll mention the hundreds of Torahs collected by the Nazis, then found and repatriated by the Monuments Men. Veterans will hear the tale told in military terms—which Army units had which Monuments officers.

“I once challenged a group of middle-school students to name a subject of interest to them, and I told them I could put up an image that would show their connection to the story,” he recalled. “One boy yelled ‘sports,’ so I put up a picture of Hitler standing in front of the Discobolus, which he illegally removed from Italy.”

The refusal of most museums to publicize their own link to the story is an endless source of frustration to Mr. Edsel. “The Kimball, the Meadows, the Dallas Museum of Art—those are our three main museums here,” he said. “I can take you and show you the pictures that have ERR codes”—the Nazis’ inventory system—”that were properly restituted. There’s the connection to the Monuments Men.”

The eldest of three children, Mr. Edsel was born in Oak Park, Ill., and raised in Dallas, which remains his base of operations. Headquarters for the Monuments Men Foundation, a converted warehouse with exposed brick walls, is lined with photographs—Florence’s Accademia where Michelangelo’s David was entombed in brick to protect it from bombing strikes by the Allied forces; Gens. Omar Bradley, Dwight D. Eisenhower and George Patton surrounded by Nazi plunder inside the Merkers, German salt mines.

Here, Mr. Edsel works the phones, appealing to the better angels of veterans who are holding on to spoils of war, perhaps even trying to sell them. One victory: He convinced a veteran to give up a leather souvenir album he’d picked up when his unit took over Hitler’s house, one of the long-missing volumes cataloging the never-built Führermuseum in Linz, Austria. Now, see it at the German Historical Museum in Berlin.

“The final chapter of World War II is just now being written,” he said. “In the next five or 10 years the remainder of that generation—whether they were veterans, displaced persons, American, French, Soviet—are going to pass, and the things that are in attics and hanging on walls are going to have new owners. My concern is that if it’s documents or books and they’re in a foreign language, the heirs won’t know what they are and may just toss them.

“Nobody can go find everything that was taken during the war,” Mr. Edsel said. “But what we can do by raising awareness is to let people know where they can find us.”

Ms. Kaufman writes about culture for the Journal.

A version of this article appeared May 2, 2013, on page D5 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: He Drills for Answers.

By LINDSAY GELLMAN

Many college graduates won’t be scrolling through Craigslist ads and Facebook

posts for new roommates this spring. That’s because they already know theirs—Mom and Dad.

Although the economy is on the mend, a still-tight job market in many areas and a load of student debt will force many 20-somethings to move back home this spring—and stay for a while. And they’ll be joining plenty of last year’s graduates who still can’t afford to move out on their own.

But financial experts say young adults can use a return to the family nest as an opportunity to focus on paying off debt and start a savings plan for both the short and long term.

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“Because you’re not paying rent [or are paying low rent to your parents], it’s a chance to make sure you quickly get on the right financial foot,” says Alexa von Tobel, founder of LearnVest.com, an online provider of financial-planning services and education for young adults.

The first thing you should do is sit down with your parents and discuss what will be expected of you—financially or otherwise, says Meg Jay, a psychologist in Charlottesville, Va., and author of “The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter, and How to Make the Most of Them.” You need to agree on which bills you’ll pay, how you’ll handle any debt (say, student loans and credit cards), how much you’ll set aside for savings and, of course, a timetable for when you will eventually move out. This allows you to take ownership of your finances and develop responsible habits even if you’re not yet financially independent. Plus, being on the same page as your parents will help minimize any household tension.

How you go about this will, of course, depend on your employment situation. If you’ve landed a job right after graduation, you should start paying for your personal expenses—cellphone bill, car payment, insurance and gas among them—as well as aggressively paying down any debt.

John Schuller returned home after graduating from Illinois State University in December in order to save money. He started working at a Chicago immigration firm in February and pays for expenses including a gym membership and motorcycle registration and insurance. He will soon start making student-loan payments as well.

Working young adults also should contribute to the household budget in some fashion. Mr. Schuller, 22, says he puts gas in the family car and fixes household appliances that are on the fritz. At a recent family outing for breakfast near his home in Darien, Ill., he picked up the tab.

If you’re moving back home to attend graduate school, the rules should still apply—in some form. Sarah Bialecki moved back home to Monroe, Mich., after graduating from Central Michigan University in spring 2011, to pursue a graduate degree in occupational therapy. The 23-year-old works part-time as a switchboard operator to pay for her personal expenses, such as gas, textbooks, food and tuition, not covered by federal student loans.

And if you’re returning home without a job, your No. 1 task should be to find one. “You need to get a job—any job,” says Harlan Cohen, syndicated advice columnist and author of books for young adults and parents. This includes landing part-time or summer work while you actively network and look for a full-time spot.

Once you have a handle on your expenses, start saving—a lot. Start by building up emergency savings equivalent to three to six months of your take-home pay (or if you’re not working full-time, your expenses), says Kimberly Foss, a wealth adviser in Sacramento, Calif.

Then start thinking long term. If your employer offers a 401(k) retirement saving plan, contribute at least enough to get a company match, if there is one. Also, open up a Roth individual retirement account (maximum contribution for 2013 is $5,500).

And what if you’ve been doing all of these things for a year or so, and still can’t afford to leave the nest? Try an enforced savings plan with your parents, says Ms. Foss. Pay your parents a set amount each month to cover, say, rent, utilities and groceries. Have them set aside the money until there’s enough saved up for you to move out.

—Email: lindsay.gellman@wsj.com

By JAMIE EWBANK

Christian Mueringer / Alamy

Mont Ventoux’s peak

THE BARREN PEAK of Provence’s Mont Ventoux has a fearsome reputation among professional cyclists, but the Giant of Provence is also proof of the great cycling truism: Anyone with a bike can ride the same mountains as cycling’s heroes.

The Tour de France will return to Ventoux for the 15th time this summer, bringing with it enormous crowds. But even outside of those raucous days, the area remains the perfect place to make your own breakaway, offering everything from medieval architecture to mountain-reared pork and lamb, to be washed down, of course, with robust local wine.

Unlike multi-mountain holidays such as the Raid Pyrénéen—the route across the Pyrenees from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean—Mont Ventoux is ideally suited to credit-card touring and has enough off-the-bike diversions to be more than just a cycling holiday. Instead of climbing several mountains over several days, moving from hotel to hotel as you go, here you can stay in one location and choose three routes up one mountain.

Professional cyclists can make the ascent in just over an hour of nonstop cycling. Strong club riders will manage it in about double that time, but anyone who is fit and healthy can attempt the climb as long as you allow yourself several hours for rest stops.

Here’s our guide to an ascendant weekend on Mont Ventoux.

Day One

Friday

7:46 p.m. | Arrive at Avignon TGV and head to the small commune of Crillon le Brave, near the foot of Mont Ventoux. Hardened cyclists may want to ride the 40 kilometer journey, or you can take a taxi for around €80.

8:40 p.m. | As well as being a perfect base camp for all three ascents of Ventoux, the Relais & Châteaux’s Hotel Crillon le Brave is a beautiful place to stay. Its guest rooms are spread across several 17th-century houses linked by courtyards and bridges, and set alongside a pool and restaurant area where you can dine on local specialties, including filet d’agneau, and sip Châteauneuf-du-Pape. If you’re traveling without your bike, you can rent one from the hotel, which also has a Coureurs du Ventoux guest book to record your time. Rooms from €280 per night; place de l’Église, crillonlebrave.com

Day Two

Saturday

10 a.m. | Cyclists looking to record a good time for the ascent tend to set off early in the morning to avoid having to ride in the midday sun, but if you’re planning to bike at an unhurried pace, you can afford to leave later. Take the D974 and D164 toward Sault and enjoy a late breakfast at Le Provençal, a courtyard cafe in one of the town’s venerable buildings, where you can enjoy local pâté and lamb dishes for very reasonable prices. rue Porte des Aires; +33 (0)4 90 64 09 09

12 p.m. | Arrive in Sault, often thought of as the gentlest ascent and the most traditionally picturesque route. The town sits on the tip of the Vaucluse plateau, looking west toward Ventoux. Head to its elevated public boules court, from where you can see farmhouses dotted among the vast, blue fields of lavender the city is known for. Everywhere in town you’ll be greeted by the stylized ceramic cicadas designed by Louis Sicard.

From here, ride up the hill into Sault’s winding medieval streets, where you’ll find well-preserved 16th-century houses and a moving Maquis memorial. Grab lunch at one of the numerous cafes and enjoy the laid-back, Gallic culture, with a good view, a strong drink and not a laptop in sight.

1 p.m. | Begin your 26-kilometer ride from the boules court, dropping down the short, steep road into the valley and heading toward Ventoux on the narrow D164, making long sweeps left and right across the valley before entering the beech forests and starting the climb. The ascent from Sault is the longest of the three, and consequently the gentlest, with the early roads in the forest taking long, straight tilts.

2:30 p.m. | Two-thirds of the way into your climb, approaching the cafe and ski station at Chalet Reynard, the route is almost flat. The easing gradient comes at just the point where the road starts to lift out of the trees, giving you respite and a view to enjoy with it. The crowds—and applause—that greet your arrival at the chalet can be a shock after 15 kilometers of comparative solitude. Eat at the cafe and refill your water bottles before tackling the last leg. +33 (0)4 90 61 84 55; chalet-reynard.fr

3 p.m. | From here, you enter the iconic “moonscape,” where the peak of the mountain, beginning in the 12th century, was deforested to feed the shipyards in distant Toulon. The roads are steeper, and the mistral can be as difficult as the gradients if you’re unfortunate enough to find a headwind.

3:40 p.m. | After a few kilometers on the limestone slopes, stop at the Tom Simpson memorial for a reflective moment, leaving a bottle or cycling cap in tribute to the World Champion who died here during the 1967 Tour de France. This stop is also a useful respite before the final kilometer up to the last hairpin and the tiny, steep ramp to the Ventoux observatory.

4 p.m. | Spend some time getting your breath back and taking in the spectacular views. Despite being a crowded tourist spot, the summit of Ventoux has little more than a gift shop to offer, where you can buy sweets and souvenirs before starting the descent.

The contrast between the hours of ascending and the minutes of descending is striking. Even if you’re riding cautiously, you will be back in Crillon le Brave and taking a dip in the hotel’s pool within the hour. Take the descent cautiously, watching for oncoming cars that have pulled into your lane to overtake ascending riders.

Day Three

Sunday

10 a.m. | Follow the D138 through four kilometers of fields and flatlands from Crillon le Brave to Bédoin and start your morning with a tour of the town.

For cyclists, Bédoin is both Mecca and the Glastonbury festival, a place of solemn pilgrimage, yet so filled with kindred spirits that it is hard to avoid an atmosphere of communal celebration. You cannot take a photograph without a handlebar, a wheel or a Lycra-clad thigh intruding into it.

Fortify yourself for the journey ahead the way professionals did in less scientific days: with steak tartare at a roadside cafe. For something less visceral, lunch at the Hotel des Pins’s restaurant, L’Esprit Jardin, where you can have another Provençal speciality, côte de porc du Ventoux aux girolles. Mains from €15, hotel-des-pins.fr

1 p.m. | From Bédoin, ride gently through the vineyards of St.-Colombe and St.-Estève, spinning a lower gear than you think you need and saving yourself for the beautiful but unrelenting climb through the forest, where you’ll hit stretches of gradients that average 9% and peak at more than 12% along this 21-kilometer route.

2:40 p.m. | Stop at the signpost for Petit Moutet, about 12 kilometers up the climb, and enjoy the vista between two sections of forest. Few other vantage points include so much of Ventoux’s varied terrain. It can be daunting, but keep in mind that the summit isn’t going anywhere: Measure your efforts, take in the lush woodland and rocky passes and work your way up to Chalet Reynard, where you’ll benefit from familiarity with the final kilometers of the route.

4:30 p.m. | On your downhill leg, stop for a cooling demi-pression at Le Guintrand, a quiet cafe bar in St.-Colombe that offers shady outdoor tables and a view of the route without the bustle of Bédoin itself (+33 (0)4 90 37 10 08; leguintrand.com

). Once refreshed, cross the road for dinner beneath the hanging baskets at La Colombe. +33 (0)4 90 65 61 20

Day Four

Monday

9 a.m. | The route along the D13 and D938 to Malaucène is a short but rolling 16 kilometers—just enough to warm up for the final, third ascent. Begin the journey from Malaucène, which has neither Bédoin’s single-mindedness nor the valley vistas of Sault, yet in many ways is the start of the Ventoux legend. It was from Malaucène that the Renaissance poet Petrarch made one of the first ascents of the mountain, albeit on foot rather than on a carbon-fiber wonderbike. It is said that Petrarch’s account of climbing Ventoux popularized Alpinism, and Malaucène remains popular with rock climbers to this day.

11 a.m. | The ascent from Malaucène can be as tough as the climb from Bédoin, but with more shelter from the wind. It will take you three or four hours, depending on how well you have recovered from your previous exertions. While you will spend long spells riding up 9-10% slopes, the steep sections are broken up by gentler pitches of around 3%—and even the odd false-flat. This forces some grueling changes of rhythm, but also allows you some respite.

1:20 p.m. | By the time you reach Mont Serein, you’ve tackled the hardest that the Malaucène ascent has to offer and the final stretch is similar to the Bédoin ascent.

2:20 p.m. | On the descent to Bédoin, stop at Chalet Reynard for one final lunch, before returning to the hotel and departing. Express trains to Paris leave Avignon TGV every hour, and although the distance from Crillon le Brave to Avignon was ridable Friday, no one could fault you for taking a taxi back.

By MARK HULBERT

It has always been difficult for investors to consistently beat index funds. It has been nearly impossible lately.

And there’s a double whammy: The small number of advisers who outperform the market rarely can keep doing so.

One big culprit, experts say: the rise of sophisticated computer-trading programs.

Chris Gall

Consider the 51 advisers out of more than 200 on the Hulbert Financial Digest’s list who beat the market in the decade-long period that ended April 30, 2012, as measured by the Wilshire 5000 Total Market index, including reinvested dividends.

Of that group, just 11—or 22%—have outperformed the overall market since then. That’s no better than the percentage that applies to all advisers, regardless of past performance. Over the past year, on average, the group has lagged the Wilshire index by 6.2 percentage points.

In other words, going with a recent market beater doesn’t increase your odds of future success.

“Before the era of computer-dominated trading, it was slightly easier to identify winning advisers in advance, because you could more easily understand and evaluate what they were doing,” says Lawrence G. Tint, chairman of Quantal International, a risk-management firm for institutional investors, and former U.S. CEO of Barclays Global Investors.

One major reason why machines are winning is our inability to process lots of financial data, which is getting more complex and voluminous every year.

Terrance Odean, a finance professor at the University of California, Berkeley, has extensively studied the behavior and performance of individual traders. He points out that there used to be another human being on the other side of the trade when an individual bought or sold a stock. “Now it’s a supercomputer you’re competing with,” says Mr. Odean.

“Individuals are no longer playing against Grandmasters; they’re playing against Deep Blue,” he says, referring to the famous battle in the 1990s between chess Grandmasters and International Business Machines‘

supercomputer. Individual investors “will almost certainly lose.”

Another reason traders are losing out to machines is their general inability to assess complex data. They look at the same set of facts on different occasions and reach different conclusions, and they unwittingly let their emotions dominate their intellect.

Daniel Kahneman, professor emeritus of psychology and public affairs at Princeton University and the 2002 Nobel Laureate in economics, has widely studied this phenomenon. In his 2011 book “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” he reviewed more than 200 academic studies over the past five decades that analyzed head-to-head contests between human beings and mechanical algorithms.

Mr. Kahneman reports that man consistently loses out to machine in a wide variety of pursuits, ranging from medicine to economics, business, psychology and even things like predicting the winners of U.S. football games and judging the quality of Bordeaux wine. In each of these domains, he reports, “the accuracy of experts was matched or exceeded by a simple algorithm.”

Betting on the Pros

Some traders hold out the hope that they can beat the market by following the lead of an investment adviser. But it is close to impossible to identify these advisers in advance, according to Mr. Tint.

“The average reader of The Wall Street Journal simply won’t be able to identify these market-beating advisers,” he says. After all, “repeated studies have shown that even the best institutional investors have been unable to identify them in advance.”

Mr. Tint adds that there is an above-average chance that an awful adviser will continue to perform terribly. This creates the mathematical illusion that there also is persistence among high-ranking managers and that we can beat an index fund by following one of those top performers, he argues. But all it really tells us is that it’s a good idea to avoid a terrible adviser.

This persistence at the bottom of the rankings is well illustrated by the adviser on the Hulbert Financial Digest’s monitored list who, one year ago, was at the very bottom for trailing 10-year performance: Charlie Buck’s Situational Strategies. Sure enough, it has been a bottom performer in the 12 months since then, falling 33% versus a 17% gain for the overall stock market. The newsletter’s publishers didn’t respond to requests for comment.

There’s another reason why it is so hard for top-performing advisers to beat the index over the long term, says Mr. Tint, even when their numbers were powered by genuine ability rather than sheer luck.

Once the adviser turns in impressive performance, lots of new money flocks to his fund, diluting the ability to continue performing well.

That phenomenon appears to be what contributed to the downfall of legendary fund manager Bill Miller of Legg Mason Value Trust

. At the end of 2005, Mr. Miller had one of the hottest hands in U.S. mutual-fund history, beating the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index for each of the previous 15 years. His fund attracted lots of new money, and he found it impossible to continue his remarkable record.

From 2006 to 2011, he lagged the market in all but one year, and in 2012 he resigned as manager of that fund.

Mr. Miller, in an interview, said it is “mathematically true” that there is a portfolio size “beyond which it is difficult, if not impossible, to beat the market.” Assets under management in Legg Mason Value Trust grew markedly over the years.

The fund now run by Mr. Miller, called Legg Mason Opportunity Trust,

has less than 10% of the assets under management that his prior fund did at its peak, and was one of the best-performing mutual fund last year, with a return of 40%.

Mr. Miller says he thinks the primary cause of his hot hand turning cool was simply “bad decision-making,” and that luck played a role in his fund being ranked so highly last year.

What about Warren Buffett, chairman of Berkshire Hathaway,

who has beaten the market by a large margin over the past four decades? Isn’t he an exception?

It is certainly possible that he has been more skillful than his competitors. But with a portfolio that is now so huge, Mr. Buffett will have a more difficult time in the future picking stocks that will perform better than an index fund, Mr. Miller says. Mr. Buffett himself has said that he expects Berkshire’s future returns to be only slightly better than the S&P 500′s.

Mr. Tint says he believes much of the value that Berkshire has added in recent years has derived not from Mr. Buffett’s stock-picking skills but from the huge amount of cash at his disposal and his negotiating skills, which combine to give him an enormous advantage in managing his company and extracting very favorable terms from those who need that cash and cannot easily get it elsewhere.

The Trading Trap

The implication of all this for individual investors is straightforward: Don’t trade. Short-term trading has become so dominated by Wall Street’s computers that individuals—and professional managers—almost certainly will lose out to them over time. The obvious alternative, experts say, is to buy and hold diversified index funds with very low expenses.

The portfolio that is most widely diversified, of course, reflects all publicly traded stocks, both in the U.S. and abroad. One exchange-traded fund that provides such total-market exposure is the iShares MSCI ACWI Index Fund,

which is benchmarked to MSCI’s All Country World Index. The ETF has an expense ratio of 0.34%, or $34 per $10,000 invested.

For U.S. equities, one low-cost way to get total-market exposure is through the Vanguard Total Stock Market

ETF, which has an annual expense ratio of just 0.05%, or $5 per $10,000 invested. Almost as diversified is a fund that mimics the S&P 500. A low-cost vehicle for exposure to that index is the iShares Core S&P 500 ETF,

with an expense ratio of 0.07%, or $7 per $10,000 invested.

If you’re interested in developed countries’ stocks, a low-cost choice is the iShares MSCI EAFE Index ETF, which is benchmarked to MSCI’s Europe Australasia and Far-East index. Its expense ratio is 0.34%, or $34 per $10,000 invested.

The advice to trade as little as possible and be diversified also applies to fixed-income investing, since investors are at a disadvantage against machines in this arena as well. For fixed-income exposure in the U.S., a low-cost option is the Vanguard Total Bond Market

ETF, with an expense ratio of 0.1%, or $10 per $10,000 invested.

For exposure to international bonds, be on the lookout for a fund that Vanguard says it is close to launching: The Vanguard Total International Bond Fund, which the firm has indicated will have an expense ratio of 0.2%—which, if so, would be among the lowest in the category.

Low-cost index funds are also an obvious choice for getting diversified exposure to other asset classes. iShares offers an ETF that is benchmarked to the S&P GSCI Total Return index: the iShares S&P GSCI Commodity-Indexed Trust,

with an expense ratio of 0.75%, or $75 per $10,000 invested. To invest just in gold, one popular ETF is the iShares Gold Trust,

with an expense ratio of 0.25%, or $25 per $10,000 invested.

A New Partnership

Is there still a role for man in a world where he so consistently loses to machines?

Yes, according to Brad Barber, a finance professor at the University of California, Davis, who has extensively studied performance and behavior of individual traders. There are some things that computers either can’t do or can’t do well, such as determining whether one of the myriad patterns that emerge from data crunching makes sense.

“If you don’t understand the reason for a pattern, you’re vulnerable to following a mindless algorithm that is quite likely to perform poorly,” Mr. Barber says.

Computers are also ill-suited to thinking outside the box and devising new hypotheses and models of what might be able to beat the market in the future, Mr. Tint points out. He envisions a man-and-machine partnership in which we use computers to rigorously test our hypotheses and trade on those that survive statistical muster.

Of course, most people don’t have the computer hardware and extensive databases required to take advantage of what computers have to offer.

And even professionals who do have access to such resources need to first recognize the limitations of their decision-making abilities. Until they know what they’re not well suited to do, they are likely to perform poorly—even if they have powerful computers at their disposal. That’s because they are likely to exaggerate what they bring to the table and play down the role that computers can play.

Mr. Odean says some of the poorest performances in his studies were turned in by traders who were the most confident of their abilities. This led them to trade even more often and incur even more risk.

This often leads them to do precisely the wrong thing. A series of academic studies over the past decade compared stocks that traders buy with those that they sell, both in the U.S. as well as in some foreign countries.

The average stock traders sell goes on to outperform the average stock they buy, he says.

—Mark Hulbert is editor of the Hulbert Financial Digest, which is owned by MarketWatch/Dow Jones. Email: mark.hulbert@ dowjones.com

Write to Mark Hulbert at mark.hulbert@dowjones.com

A version of this article appeared May 11, 2013, on page B7 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Algorithms Are Making It Increasingly Difficult for Investors To Beat the Market. Here’s What You Can Do About It.

By ERIC BELLMAN

When I started my career as a business journalist in Tokyo, Japan seemed to be taking over the world and everyone got most of their news from the morning paper.

Eric Bellman

Twenty years later, India is the empire that is striking back and news is delivered directly to people’s pockets — all day, as soon as it breaks and often for free.

With all the email alerts, tweets, retweets, Facebook posts, RSS feeds and SMS updates dumped on us everyday, we are bombarded with information.

Of course, in India the majority of news junkies are still addicted to daily papers and start each morning with inky finger tips. But the amount of online information at hand at all times is rising. And The Wall Street Journal has become the latest news organization to deliver more mobile news, tailored for an increasingly-sophisticated Indian consumer.

Dow Jones & Co. launched the new Wall Street Journal India Mobile application Wednesday. The new mobile service, which will allow access to Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires stories about India and from across the world, is available for free download to Bharti Airtel Ltd. subscribers. While much of the information will be free, subscription-only, premium services are also available to anyone willing to pay 99 rupees per month.

Indians are increasingly getting news off their small screens, said Raghunath Mandava, chief marketing officer at Bharti Airtel. Still less than 10% of households in India have computers, he said, so online news can only be big on cell phones.

“Their first brush with the Internet will happen through their cellular devices,” he said in an interview.

Indian users are hungry for more ways to use their phones. They have graduated from downloading ringtones and sending text messages. Bharti Airtel’s online store for third-party applications was launched a month ago and already has 2.5 million subscribers, said Mr. Mandava.

“They are very ready,” for real-time, phone-delivered news, he said. “As customers start evolving, their expectations also start growing.”

When I was a rookie reporter back in 1989, important news took about 12 hours and multiple stopovers to arrive in the hands of the average consumer and that was fine.

“Today the average news consumer has 10 times the information that was available to even the most sophisticated trader back then.”

When the Bank of Japan announced a rate change, a dozen blue-suited Japanese reporters and I would dash out of the briefing room to get to the press club phones down the hall. We would yell the headlines and the first few paragraphs of our stories over land lines or briefcase-sized wireless phones.

Editors on the other end of the line would write a small story (hand written at my Japanese wire service.) It was then given to people that would type the story onto the wire — a crackling network of dot-matrix printers in newspapers offices across the country.

Newspapers would tear the stories off the machines and give them snappy headlines of the right sizes on the appropriate pages. The papers were typeset, printed and delivered to readers’ homes with their Meiji milk.

Of course, even back then there were financial traders who paid a lot of money to get information the minute it came off the wire. That’s why we ran. But most consumers were content to wait until breakfast.

Today the average news consumer has 10 times the information that was available to even the most sophisticated trader back then.

When the Reserve Bank of India announces policy changes, reporters just hit one button and their headlines and stories instantly pop up on computer and cell phone screens across the globe. No running, no yelling, no wait.

The value of some of this news is obvious. We want to know about RBI rate cuts, terrorist attacks and election results. Maybe even weather reports, traffic warnings and cricket scores are important enough to fill the limited space on our small screens.

But what about an “exclusive” interview where another minister says India’s economy is strong or a piece where a Bollywood star thanks her fans for her success? Do we need to be bothered by beeps in our pockets just because a store has announced a weekend sale or our friend ordered channa batura for lunch?

In some ways, the news junkies’ role has changed from consumption to categorization. When I go through the ever-expanding inbox on my phone, I am thinking: “This one I will read now. This one: read later. That one, I’ll ignore. This: forward. That: print out and file. This: need to block.”

How do you prioritize all the alerts, tweets and texts? Fishing the best bits out the sea of information can be a full-time job.

What you need is a cell phone application that takes all the information and uses a sophisticated algorithm to rate the importance of the stories, maybe using key words, names and dates. The program could also weed out rumors, old news and unreliable sources, maybe using some system where readers get to rate the value of each story.

You could also just outsource this process. To us. And count on us to go through the most relevant and freshest information out there, pick what is most important and deliver it to your pocket.

Write to Eric Bellman at eric.bellman@wsj.com

—Eric Bellman is a WSJ reporter based in Mumbai

By TOM HERMAN

Q:What is the maximum amount of wages and self-employment income subject to the Social Security tax this year? What about Medicare taxes? How do they work?

—E.C.M., Falls Church, Va.

A:First, let’s focus on your Social Security taxes. The maximum amount of earnings subject to the Social Security tax for 2013 is $113,700, according to the Social Security Administration. That’s up from $110,100 last year.

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You may have filed your taxes but that doesn’t mean you won’t have to look at them again this year. As MarketWatch’s Jim Jelter explains, there are times you really should go out of your way to amend tax returns. (Photo: AP)

The government estimates about 163 million workers will pay Social Security taxes this year. Of those, nearly 10 million will pay higher taxes as a result of this increase in what the Social Security Administration calls the “taxable minimum.” The taxable minimum amount reflects the increase in average wages.

On Medicare taxes: There is no limit on the amount of your income that is subject to Medicare taxes.

Now get ready for a new twist: Starting this year, many upper-income taxpayers have to pay an additional 0.9% Medicare tax on earned income above a certain threshold. The threshold generally is $200,000, but it’s $250,000 for married couples who file joint returns.

Here is how the tax rates work (excluding the new 0.9% tax on high-income taxpayers): For employees, the Social Security tax rate is 6.2% on income under $113,700 through the end of this year. The Medicare tax rate is 1.45% of all earned income.

For employers, the amounts are the same: The Social Security tax rate is 6.2%, while the Medicare rate is 1.45%. For self-employed workers, the Social Security tax rate is 12.4% on income under $113,700 this year. The Medicare rate is 2.9%.

You can find more details on this subject on the Social Security Administration’s website and on the Internal Revenue Service’s website.

Did you work for two or more employers last year? If so, make sure you didn’t overpay your Social Security taxes. Tax pros say it’s easy for many people, such as moonlighters or those who switched employers, to overlook this issue.

Add up the amounts that were withheld your paychecks. If the total amount last year was more than $4,624.40, claim a credit for the excess amount on your federal income-tax return. Put the excess amount on line 69 of Form 1040, or on line 41 or Form 1040A.

To fix errors or omissions on a federal income-tax return you’ve already filed, file Form 1040X, known as an “amended” return. File a separate Form 1040X for each year that needs to be amended, the IRS says.

—Send your questions to us at askdowjones.sunday03@wsj.com and include your name, address and telephone number. Questions may be edited; we regret that we cannot answer every letter.