As paltry as the returns from municipal bonds are, at least compared to stocks, they still attract a lot of investment, due to investors thinking that they are so safe. Think again. We’ve been worried for a while about the potential hit that municipal bonds, or munis, could take from this economic shutdown, and we’re […]
ETFs can be a nice tool for investors to participate in markets that they normally wouldn’t, like WTI oil futures. We need to look at the ingredients of these ETFs first. Your average investor doesn’t pay much attention to the futures markets, whether this be oil futures or any of the many other commodities and […]
How well the stock market has done in the month of April so far, in the face of all the very dark clouds in the economic sky, have people scratching their heads. When we look at the current economic picture, it sure looks like all bad news, all very bad news in fact. Unemployment claims […]
Harold Hamm of Continental Resources was already a critic of the futures market, but seeing it going into the red has him assuming that there must be misconduct involved. Harold Hamm has definitely distinguished himself as someone who knows the oil business. The United States was, not long ago, not all that big of a […]
The stock market bears have been licking their chops since stocks started to rebound, predicting a second fall and a bigger one this time. Stocks are still holding up pretty well. The current bear market started, like all bear markets do, with our wondering just how far we’d be sent down before the panic became […]
Futures contract expiration days can be plenty interesting, and a lot of money can be made, but Monday’s May WTI oil futures trading took us into another universe. A lot of money is made and lost trading oil futures, and there are some epic stories out there already, big traders who got caught on the […]
The S&P 500 is the most popular index fund by far among investors, because they think it’s better to be more diversified, to manage risk. Reality tells a different story though. The world of investing is riddled with so many myths that it would even be fair to categorize the whole thing as mythology. There […]
It is believed that small cap stocks lose more during pullbacks because they are smaller and therefore more sensitive to economic downturns. The real reason is simpler than that. It shouldn’t be as difficult and complicated to understand the movement of stock prices as we try to make it. The issue with small caps unsurprisingly […]
Demand for oil has dropped off so much from the current slowdown that the recent agreement to cut production by 10 million barrels a day hasn’t come close to fixing this. We invest in stocks presumably to make money, although when we look at how oil stocks have done over the last 6 years, there’s […]
Legendary hedge fund investor Ray Dalio is particularly known for his understanding of bonds, and has made billions from them. He now thinks that it is “crazy” for investors to hold them. Ray Dalio’s story is a true rags-to-riches one, where he quit his job one day to venture off on his own with just […]