People often ask me about my most profitable investment. It was an investment I made in October 1999. Today, it pays me a yield equivalent to 26%, and it has forever changed how I look for income opportunities. Read More

I like to consider myself a contrarian investor. Zigging when others are zagging is usually the surest way to find underpriced stocks and avoid overheated ones that are due for a pullback.   But this time, the crowd just might be right. Read More

With all the changes to the United States’ energy landscape recently, it’s easy to overlook one of the country’s most important petroleum-producing regions: the Gulf of Mexico. For energy investors, drilling in the Gulf is hardly a new story. U.S. oil companies have been… Read More

Hedge-fund managers and other institutional commodities traders are usually pretty skilled at making broad economic forecasts. But there’s one variable they just can’t seem to predict — the weather.   Mother Nature often creates havoc on agricultural production, which can be good or bad, depending on your view. Read More

Whenever I screen for stocks, I always look at whether insiders are buying shares of their companies. This kind of information can be extremely valuable to individual investors. Insiders know the industry, the inner workings of the company and the… Read More

If I had to describe the stock market in two words, then I’d pick shortsighted and (very) skittish. A brief hiccup in revenue growth, a discouraging word from management about quarterly earnings or even a bit of… Read More

Can you guess what single organization consumes the largest amount of fuel in the world — more than any airline, more than any shipping firm and more than dozens of small nations? I am talking about the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), which has really felt the pain of $100… Read More

Despite what any financial academic or index fund advocate tells you, the market isn’t perfectly rational. If it were, then it would be impossible to identify a stock that is meaningfully undervalued. There would literally… Read More

Even in the middle of summer, the high temperature in Svalbard, Norway rarely climbs above 45 degrees Fahrenheit. At night, temperatures often dip below freezing. In the heart of winter, temperatures can dip to as low as -30 degrees Fahrenheit — at that temperature water freezes almost instantaneously. Read More

The smoke has finally cleared, and the final numbers are now in. Last year saw a frenzy of merger and acquisition (M&A) activity, especially in the oil and gas sector.   Between Jan. 1 and Dec. 31, oil and gas companies signed a total of 191 deals… Read More