Steven Sears has been writing columns promoting options trading for individual investors since 2006. He’s now suggesting that they use options to replace dividends. Dividends have always had a special place in the hearts of many investors, a love affair that continues even in the face of the economic crisis that we are in the […]

During the last financial crisis, mortgage lending was at the forefront. This one is far broader. Mortgages are caught up in this big net as well, but not as much as some think. Those who remember the financial crisis of 2008 will have a pretty good idea of how big of a deal the mortgage […]

Technical analysts at least look at what really matters when looking at stock prices, the actual prices. Even when we’re looking at the right thing, it’s important to use our heads. Among the various ways that we can study the movement of stock prices, studying the actual price trends makes the most sense by far, […]

Quantitative analysts, called quants, employ mathematical and statistical models to understand things. Two of them are now stepping up to provide investors with their insights. Quantitative analysis is used in many fields to seek to understand various processes by seeking to quantify data and provide models. They are particularly widely used in the world of […]

As mired as stock markets are in uncertainty during these times, and as much as they have fallen, things could be a whole lot worse if not for all the buying of these dips. With stocks moving so much off of the all-time highs we were at not so long ago, due to the fears […]

Fundamental analysts tend to miss a lot when they analyze stock plays, but they don’t usually get it all wrong. The idea of entering Morgan Stanley right now is just brutal. Whether Morgan Stanley deserves to be called a buy at some point down the road, it certainly isn’t now. We’d actually have a hard […]

Whenever we see a meaningful drop in stock prices, people start lining up for a rate cut. The recent cuts may have made at least some sense, but one now just does not. When the news that China had locked down over 50 million people a little over a month ago, as part of a […]

The way that initial public offerings have been traditionally placed in the market harkens back to bygone days where paper was king. We’re finally looking to modernize this process. One of the real obstacles for companies going public is the long and expensive process of getting a stock from the private side to offering their […]

When they look at how much money retail investors are pouring into both stock and bond funds right now, Bank of America is worried that we might be creating a bubble with both. We use the word bubble to describe situations where prices of things rise so much that they end up collapsing under their […]

We might want to think that seeing less new ETFs introduced last year, as well as a higher percentage of them closing, might not look so good for ETFs. Think again. The 2010s were definitely the decade of the ETF, as they made up a huge amount of ground over mutual funds and are now […]