In a rising market, bad news for a company can be shrugged off as investors focus on the positives. But in recent weeks, investors have been less forgiving, meting out punishment to any company that delivers bad news. Let’s take a look at all of the companies that have lost… Read More

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to trade stocks alongside corporate insiders? There is a way you can do this — and it is perfectly legal. Information about insider share purchases and sales is readily available to anyone who wants to view it. That’s because corporate officers,… Read More

As the past couple years have shown, U.S. equities are once again a prime source of attractive returns. But they’re not the only — or necessarily the best — source. Like many market watchers, I believe the highest long-term returns are to be had in developing countries… Read More

I recently watched the classic man-eating fish movie “Jaws” and the latest action in the precious metals space reminded me of the tagline for the film, “Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the water…” Is it safe to swim in the water?… Read More

I know what income investors like. If I put a double-digit yield in the headline of an article, it will see thousands more reads than an article without a big headline yield. I can put “safety”… Read More

In the past few years, we’ve discussed the importance of catalyst investing. This involves clearly identifiable events that, if they come to pass, the they’ll propel a stock sharply higher. Here are a handful of stocks that could strongly benefit… Read More

The Federal Reserve is normally between a rock and a hard place. That’s the nature of its job. On one hand, it has to keep inflation in check and prevent the economy from overheating. On… Read More

Risk equals return. It’s one of the most widely-held maxims in investing and, if you look at the numbers, the sentiment rings true. Stocks have returned about 9.5% a year since 1926, according to Ibbotson & Associates, clearly better than the roughly 5.5% return bonds have delivered annually during that… Read More

In the investment business, we’re very good at talking about when to buy. We can wax poetic about the single-digit piece-to-earnings (P/E) ratio and the deep-discount to book value or the return on equity. It’s the selling part we all need to work on… The reasons investors hang on to a stock are so vast and complex, it would take a team of psychiatrists at least a decade to begin analyzing them. Typically, the two major reasons are greed and emotional attachment. Greed is… Read More

In the investment business, we’re very good at talking about when to buy. We can wax poetic about the single-digit piece-to-earnings (P/E) ratio and the deep-discount to book value or the return on equity. It’s the selling part we all need to work on… The reasons investors hang on to a stock are so vast and complex, it would take a team of psychiatrists at least a decade to begin analyzing them. Typically, the two major reasons are greed and emotional attachment. Greed is simple: we like making money and we want to make more. The emotional attachment is the weird part. I’ve always been a big fan of the Warren Buffett philosophy on how to deal with the emotions involved in holding stocks: that stock doesn’t know that you own it. The hundred shares of Cisco (Nasdaq: CSCO) doesn’t tell you it loves you when you come home from work. If it does, we’ve got bigger problems. It’s OK to sell stuff. Look at it like you would a party. Eventually you have to… Read More

The “Dogs of the Dow” strategy consists of buying a basket of the cheapest stocks out of the 30 components of the Dow Jones Industrial Average. One of the more popular strategies in recent years has been to buy Dow stocks with the highest… Read More