Stocks

What Was Your First Investment Ever?

April 20, 2013

I was thinking back to how I first became so enthusiastic about saving and investing and how far I’ve come since my dad brought home the first finance book I’d ever read from the library.  It was a book about George Soros and how he’d made Billions on a bet against the British Pound.  I’m [...]

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3 Ways to Play the Crisis in Cyprus

March 26, 2013

For anyone watching the circus playing out in Cyprus, there was an initial shock and awe campaign by which the government suggested that all depositors in major Cypriot banks should take a haircut to the tune of 5-10% depending on the amount held in order to bail out banks. These banks were in such bad [...]

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Market Rally Unfazed By Cyprus – Time to Sell Yet?

March 21, 2013

As an investor glued to the news, Jim Cramer and all the doomsday blogs, you’d think markets should have sold off in epic fashion and gold should be breaching $3000 by now.  Calamity after calamity has yet to result in the selloff everyone’s waiting for.  Going back to 2012, we had the European debt crisis. [...]

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Why Stocks Are Breaking Records and it’s Not a Bubble

March 5, 2013

So, we’ve seen the stock market continue to rally in the face of all sorts of should-be lousy news ranging from the re-election of “anti-biz” Obama to the end of the world sequestration that we have somehow survived thus far.  This momentum and continued rally in equities has many investors and analysts scratching their heads [...]

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These Mutual Funds Actually Beat The Index. And “The Market”

February 14, 2013

I usually deter investors from chasing hot mutual funds based on last year’s returns because they tend to have much higher costs and managers find it difficult to repeat the performance. In fact, most mutual fund, hedge fund and individual money manager outperformance in a given year is due solely to luck and not skill [...]

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Become Better Diversified and Get Higher Stock Market Returns

February 10, 2013

Every investor knows that diversification is the most fundamental and important part of a good, long-term investment strategy. However, there is no clear cut definition for what “diversification” really means. How far do you take the idea of diversification? Do you stop at the number of stocks or bonds your hold, or do you look [...]

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Why Hasn’t the Market Crashed Like the “Experts” Warned?

February 6, 2013

The investment “expert” and pundit world is full of both permabears and permabulls.  Both sets of blowhards are pretty annoying because they refuse to change their outlook regardless of a change in conditions and nobody is there to call out every expert that’s been wrong.  There’s no story there pointing out all the people who [...]

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Dollar Cost Averaging: Actual Results From the Past 10 Years

January 29, 2013

Dollar cost averaging is one of the most popular and basic investing tips out there when it comes to basic theory and practice.  There are many positives, and a few negatives worth considering if you’re going to dollar cost average your investments rather than use a different method.  To put the real results into perspective [...]

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Personal Capital Review – All Your Financials in One Spot

January 13, 2013

Personal Capital is a one-stop shop for aggregating all your financial information in one spot in an automated fashion.  The beauty of the system is that once you connect all your financial institutions from banks to IRA, 401(k) accounts and more, your Personal Capital dashboard will aggregate everything in various views and can be customized [...]

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Net Worth Analysis for 2012: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

January 8, 2013

I was reminded by a few different blogging buddies when doing their recaps of 2012 to look at my own Net Worth for 2012.  Everyone seems to calculate their net worth differently (if at all).  These days, a lot of people are switching over to a free service from Personal Capital to keep everything in [...]

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