After a pair of stopgap funding measures, Washington is getting ready to play hardball on the government budget. Both sides have drawn clear lines in the sand, and April 8 looms as the day when government buildings could be officially locked, government employees told to stay home and all non-essential services could grind to a halt. Whether the shutdown lasts a few days or a few weeks, your portfolio will feel the impact. And you need to start preparing now…   Too many uncertainties Investors crave certainty. Yet this is an especially murky time. Key questions need… Read More

After a pair of stopgap funding measures, Washington is getting ready to play hardball on the government budget. Both sides have drawn clear lines in the sand, and April 8 looms as the day when government buildings could be officially locked, government employees told to stay home and all non-essential services could grind to a halt. Whether the shutdown lasts a few days or a few weeks, your portfolio will feel the impact. And you need to start preparing now…   Too many uncertainties Investors crave certainty. Yet this is an especially murky time. Key questions need to be asked. Will Japan’s economy go into recession as its government tackles the economic effect of the current crisis? How will the Middle East play out (and what will happen to oil prices)? Will more European economies need a bailout? How will the U.S. markets handle the end of the Federal Reserve’s second round of quantitative easing (QE2)? [I also wrote earlier about how investors’ record levels of borrowing on margin could bring the market crashing down…] The market has climbed a “wall of worry” in recent quarters, but the wall keeps getting… Read More

Given enough time, the small caps from any industry are apt to outperform their large caps siblings. The problem is, investors tend to gravitate toward the larger and more familiar names, while the worthy, off-the-radar small caps tend to be overlooked. The idea applies within the banking… Read More

Success breeds confidence. When it comes to investing, that’s not always a good thing. Some investors see a rising portfolio and start to figure out ways to keep their returns moving higher. The simplest way to magnify returns is to borrow money from a broker and re-invest those funds, a practice known as “investing on margin.” Yet, when investors have started to buy more and more stocks on margin, they often set the stage for cascading declines in the stock market as margin calls beget yet more selling. That’s why you should be… Read More

Success breeds confidence. When it comes to investing, that’s not always a good thing. Some investors see a rising portfolio and start to figure out ways to keep their returns moving higher. The simplest way to magnify returns is to borrow money from a broker and re-invest those funds, a practice known as “investing on margin.” Yet, when investors have started to buy more and more stocks on margin, they often set the stage for cascading declines in the stock market as margin calls beget yet more selling. That’s why you should be concerned that investing on margin is back in vogue, whether you are doing it yourself or not. #-ad_banner-#A lesson not learned On March 9, 2000, the Nasdaq index moved up above 5,000 for the first-time ever as investors put increasing amounts of money into scorching tech stocks. Part of that was fueled by a then-record $275 billion in funds that investors had borrowed from their brokers. Many of these investors were leveraged to the hilt, right up to the maximum allowable borrowing limit of 50% of a portfolio.   That high level of… Read More

Less than a year ago, China unveiled what it considered to be a younger and stronger statue of a bull to rival the one sitting on Wall Street in New York. The fact that it is also larger shows China’s ambition. With an… Read More

It’s going to touch everything. It will make a difference in what we eat, where we travel, how we heat and cool our homes, even how much we save and spend. Actually, these sorts of changes are already taking place. But over the next… Read More

Whenever a stock takes a major hit, I like to wait a few days before assessing the wreckage. It gives time to let the issues clarify and provides a chance to see where shares end up once investors have finished selling. After plunging from $64… Read More

The life cycle of a company follows four distinct steps. The last two are maturity and decline, and both are generally not the stages when you want to invest. The first is introduction and covers the period when a company is in its start-up phase and progresses to introducing some… Read More

If you’re the CEO of a large corporation, you do not want to see your company’s name in this article. The companies in this article stumbled — badly — in the past year and have seen their shares prices fall by half — or… Read More

In my recent article The Perfect Way to Short Nuclear Power Stocks, I describe how the nuclear crisis in Japan is negatively impacting nuclear power companies worldwide, providing potentially profitable trading opportunities. However, another way to profit from the ongoing nuclear crisis is to invest in… Read More

With a rising economy comes rising expectations. CEOs at mid-sized and large companies need to find new paths to growth to justify — or boost — their company’s stock price. That’s no mean feat in an economy still in slow-growth mode. As a… Read More