Trading has been particularly lucrative over the last while with markets being so nice and volatile, but trading also accelerates the impact of our mistakes. Here are the biggest ones. Trading is in a sense investing at a much higher rate of speed. The principles of trading versus investing are actually very similar, at least […]
J.P. Morgan Asset Management’s chief global strategist David Kelly has just shared his thoughts on a number of issues of concern to investors, and he covers a lot of ground. While most investors approach investing in a completely passive way, and don’t really have a plan to react to circumstances and outlooks as they develop […]
Royal Dutch Shell is being touted by Barron’s as one of their top 10 stock picks for 2020. They think its growth prospects are noteworthy, but it might be good for another reason. There are plenty of stocks that haven’t done very well over the last 10 years, and have tanked while the average stock […]
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 […]
Income in retirement is far too important to be left to simple-minded calculations. We need to get off the path of simple-mindedness and actually look to figure this out right. People’s situations differ quite a bit in retirement, and the circumstances surrounding the desirability of certain investments certainly do. We can’t just throw out percentages […]
Bernstein continues to attempt to downplay the effect that Elizabeth Warren becoming president may have on the markets. It may be less than we think, but for a different reason. The extent of the worry about how Elizabeth Warren winning the presidency in 2020 may affect the stock market is well documented. Bernstein economist Philipp […]
Saudi Aramco is far from your average IPO, starting with it being only a very small piece of the overall company, with the Saudi government holding the rest. This is not a good bet. Having the opportunity to invest in the world’s largest oil company might appear to be pretty tempting, but this is far […]
Bankruptcies are painful at any age, including late in life. The aftermath of a bankruptcy isn’t as bad as many may think, and considerably less so for people already in retirement. Declaring a bankruptcy in itself isn’t a negative thing, and in fact this is a solution to a problem and not a problem in […]
Analysts are lining up to tell us that small-caps will be big in 2020, where we may expect the S&P 600 and the Russell 2000 to beat the S&P 500. Visions of sugarplums aren’t enough though. Whether or not small cap indexes end up beating the large cap ones such as the Dow, the Nasdaq, […]
Of all the things we look at when we try to gauge the state of the economy, nothing is more important than employment numbers. This is where the rubber meets the road. With all of the focus lately on the trade war, Friday’s jobs report served to erase at least some of these concerns, and […]