With the SEC making the offering of annuities in companies’ 401(k) retirement plans easier, we are now scrambling to make this type of investment more transparent. There is something particularly tempting about annuities that appeal to a lot of people, for the same reasons that they loved fixed benefit pension plans. There is no doubt […]

Back on January 24, the stock market began to buckle under the force of the coronavirus, we told you it was time for gold, but bonds have been picking up as well. Investors tend to hold a lot of bonds, presumably for a rainy day, although given that the sun shines most of the time, […]

Companies these days are borrowing at unprecedented rates, although the real threat here isn’t so much default as it is sacrificing future profits for shorter-term stock love. If you are holding stocks these days, which a lot of people are, you just have to love what companies are doing with their balance sheets in this […]

It is said that there are eight million stories in the Naked City, some more naked than others. The one about yields putting a lid on stock growth is about as naked as they come. We always have our eyes open to what is happening in the financial world, which includes looking at what other […]

According to BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, the most important thing to investors these days is climate change. He has started addressing this by getting out of coal companies. BlackRock’s Larry Fink wants to make the world’s largest fund company more “socially responsible,” and has taken the first step by announcing that the firm will no […]

Democratic presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg just wrote an op-ed piece to tell us that in spite of what President Trump says, the economy is broken and he wants to fix it. It is not uncommon for politicians or prospective ones to try to twist things around to suit their political ambitions. Former NYC mayor, mega-billionaire, […]

A lot of investors are intrigued by the Dogs of the Dow strategy, which goes with the top 10 dividend yielding Dow stocks and beats the market. This doesn’t mean it’s that great though. Looking to beat the overall market is a goal of a whole lot of investors, including the great majority of those […]

Depending on the circumstances, it can always be a good time to refinance your mortgage. Today’s low rates make this even more tempting, but we need to be careful. There never seems to be a shortage of what we could call refinance bears out there, those who seem to forever want to caution us against […]

We always want to make sure that our investment decisions are made from the high ground. If we are willing to go out on a limb, we need to make sure the limb is strong. Folks are eyeing medical supply maker Becton Dickinson and it’s being touted as a smart play for 2020. Aside from […]

In the investment world, there’s an oracle on every street corner, all looking to pop out in your face and tell you all about what is going to happen. Be careful who you listen to. Jeffrey Gundlach is certainly not one afraid to go out on a limb. He famously proclaimed municipal bonds as “the […]