Back in early October of last year, I said individual investors would be well-served to follow the trading activity of shareholder activist and hedge-fund titan Carl Icahn. Icahn’s success as an investor has pushed his net worth to an estimated $12.5 billion and to… Read More

Benjamin Graham and David Dodd, widely considered to be the fathers of modern investing philosophy, had a deep affinity for value stocks. They taught disciples such as Warren Buffett to assess companies in the most pessimistic possible scenarios. This makes sense. These men wrote their famous book, Security Analysis, in… Read More

The stock market is a lot like high school. You have the super popular group (tech stocks, social media IPOs, commodity stocks) that runs the place for the time being. Then you have groups in the middle who really don’t make any waves (like a Wells Fargo (NYSE:… Read More

I’ve been in the investing business a long time. I’ve witnessed two nasty bear markets and three bull markets, including the massive one from the 1990s. I’ve seen a technology boom then bust, a collapse of the… Read More

If you’ve been looking at a sea of red on your stock screens lately, then you have plenty of company. A hefty 495 stocks in the S&P 500 have moved lower since the market sell-off began July 22. Yet a quick look at the five lonely stocks that have been… Read More

After a solid rebound through the winter and spring of 2009-2010, the U.S. economy began to lose steam. As spring turned into summer in 2010, investors grew increasingly concerned the U.S. economy would slip right back into… Read More

Did you know it’s possible to capture emerging-market growth opportunities while downplaying risks such as inflation and currency swings? A great way to accomplish this is to own blue-chip companies that have a solid presence and significant… Read More

The market is taking it on the chin this week, which was to be expected, according to technical analysts. Just last week, I noted that history tells us the Dow Jones Industrial Average would need to move back to recent lows (known as a “retest”). Sure enough,… Read More

Back in the fall of 2008, virtually every equity-focused mutual fund was falling in value. The selloff was most keenly felt in many closed-end funds (CEFs). Not only did these funds see their portfolio of investments drop in value, but the fund price… Read More

The list of investing mistakes I’ve seen (and as a stock broker in the go-go 1990s and early 2000s, I had an opportunity to see plenty of them) is longer than I care to recall. Over-committing, over-trading, sector concentration, you name it — I saw it all as so many… Read More