In the past few years, the global investment landscape has undergone massive change. Some of the smallest and riskiest economies saw their stock markets soar, in many instances exceeding the quite impressive gains secured in the United States. As I noted back in December, some stock markets roughly tripled in value in just two years. The go-go era of emerging-market investing has come to an abrupt halt. Not a single stock market outside of Europe has risen even 10% this year. And some formerly hot emerging markets such as India and… Read More

In the past few years, the global investment landscape has undergone massive change. Some of the smallest and riskiest economies saw their stock markets soar, in many instances exceeding the quite impressive gains secured in the United States. As I noted back in December, some stock markets roughly tripled in value in just two years. The go-go era of emerging-market investing has come to an abrupt halt. Not a single stock market outside of Europe has risen even 10% this year. And some formerly hot emerging markets such as India and Peru are off by more than 10%.   The fact that European stock markets have been top gainers thus far in 2011 comes as a bit of a surprise. After all, the European Union is still wrestling with potential debt bombs in places like Greece and Portugal and voices calling for dissolution of the euro currency have not grown any quieter. But investors are willing to give some credit for a degree of corporate belt-tightening underway, and if the currency crisis can be tamed, these markets could rise yet further,… Read More

In Omaha during Berkshire Hathaway’s (NYSE: BRK-B) annual shareholder meeting, Tom Gaynor, chief investment officer of Markel Corp. (NYSE: MKL), detailed an asset class he follows — SID — which stands for “stocks in drag.” This was meant to highlight that certain “safer” securities… Read More

Some traders may be hesitant to buy a stock that’s just hit a new all-time high. But personally, I hunt for these types of trades because they often represent low-risk/high-reward opportunity. Often, stocks trading at new highs continue to advance because there’s no historical technical resistance in sight. Read More

#-ad_banner-#Investing in tech stocks can be quite tricky. The biggest players such as Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT), Dell (Nasdaq: DELL), Cisco Systems (Nasdaq: CSCO) and Hewlettt-Packard (NYSE: HPQ) are struggling to find growth. The industry’s smallest players can post impressive growth in short stretches, but they can also plunge in value… Read More

With the maturity of the automotive industry in developed markets, the real growth potential lies primarily in emerging markets. Emerging markets account for close to 40% of the global market and were recently estimated to have produced 30 million vehicles. By most measures, China… Read More

Many investors wish they had invested earlier or more substantially in one or more of the BRIC countries: Brazil, Russia, India and China. In the mid-1990s the writing was on the wall that China and other emerging markets were headed for bigger and… Read More

Airlines are one of those industries that just don’t get any respect from investors. These long-suffering companies have a history of losses and usually carry a lot of debt. Billionaire investor Warren Buffett took notice of these qualities and summed it all up when he wrote, “The worst sort of… Read More

#-ad_banner-#A dozen years ago, Silicon Valley was responsible for one of the most prolific initial public offering (IPO) markets ever seen. Many fortunes were made, as a record 486 companies went public in 1999. The next year was the second-best ever, with 406 additional… Read More

Here’s something many investors probably don’t know about major drug makers like Pfizer (NYSE: PFE), Bristol-Meyers Squibb (NYSE: BMY), Eli Lilly (NYSE: LLY) and others (collectively known as Big Pharma): They’re a lot like the major car companies. To save money back in the 1970s, the auto… Read More

Turmoil in Libya and other places in the Middle East have caused capital to flow out of equity markets and into traditional safe havens such as gold and silver. Surprisingly, one of the equity sectors that was least affected by the shift was emerging… Read More