Like every investor, I try to read voraciously to get an edge. I’m always on the lookout for investment angles that haven’t gotten much press but could eventually turn into a market-moving event. So my ears perked up last week when I saw that hedge fund traders have… Read More

A surging stock market has brought a smile to the face of investment bankers. They’ve suddenly found a much more receptive environment for new initial public offerings (IPOs), with 16 deals of at least $100 million being pulled off in October — the best month for IPOs this year. And… Read More

A recent article in The Economist caught my eye, and a particular statistic I found interesting was that until 1800, China and India accounted for about half of the global economy. The Industrial Revolution in the late 1700s shifted the balance of power to… Read More

It’s pretty simple really. You sell products, you bring in revenue. Subtract whatever cash was spent on those products (cost of goods sold) and you have gross profit. The larger the gross profit, the more earnings are left over once… Read More

Look around the room you are in. I guarantee there’s at least a dozen devices powered by electricity, and of those, at least a few are powered by batteries. Batteries — or in more precise terms, energy storage devices — have remained pretty much unchanged… Read More

As Americans were heading back to work from the long Memorial Day weekend, Europeans were fretting about a looming banking crisis that threatened to take down major banks in Ireland and Spain. Europe went on to dodge that bullet, and its equity markets have rebounded +30% in the last five… Read More

Investing would be so much easier with a time machine. A person could simply go back in time and buy today’s industry behemoths while they were still just up and coming regular companies. Too bad there’s no such thing as a time machine. However,… Read More

By now most investors are aware of the immense impact China has had on global commodity markets. In many cases, prices have exploded upwards as the country’s billion-plus people modernize its economy. But… Read More

Deflation has become a central  concern these days. The Federal Reserve sweats the notion of falling prices across the economy, as it tends shrink asset values even as debts against those assets remain constant. And companies hate deflation, because it usually… Read More

Although most of us are too young to remember, imagine what it must have been like during the Great Depression or the Second World War. Shortages at those times had most everyone scrapping for basics like sugar, butter or coffee. Such things may seem unfathomable… Read More