Stocks & Mutual Funds Articles

Since I can remember, and that's a long time ago, the Wall Street brokerage companies, mavens and mutual fund managers have been exhorting the mantra of Buy and Hold for all your investments. There have been erudite studies published that this is the...

After finding the price of a particular stock, usually the next number everyone looks at is the P/E ratio. P/E is the ratio of a company's share price to its per-share earnings. A P/E ratio of 10 means that the company has 1 of annual, per-share earn...

Most people think the stock market is a zero sum game because there is a buyer for each seller and seller for each buyer so each cancels the other and everything is equal. Not quite. There are losers here, both the buyer and the seller because each o...

Why? Because I am going to shatter your conventional wisdom as I have many times in previous columns about the lies that Wall Street continues to tell you. This time we are going to go deeper into the economy to unearth the truth about lies the polit...

Ever done any whitewater rafting or canoeing? Long periods of tranquil river followed by short periods of terror. Suddenly the water grips your vessel and you are pushed and shoved by massive currents over which you have no control. Missing boulders ...

People are always asking me when should I sell my stock or mutual funds? There are some relatively easy answers to this. In fact, so simple that you won't believe them, but they are things I have learned over the past 30 years as a professional trade...

How many times have you said to yourself, "I'd like to quit this job and just make a living trading in the stock market"? Well, maybe you can, BUT... There a few things to consider. First, you have to have enough money to generate the income you need...

You probably know the story of Sherlock Holmes and the 7% solution. He had a drug addiction. He needed the drug. He was able to control his addiction by taking the drug in a 7% concentration. Anyone with common sense knows you cannot survive on 7%. I...

If you have a pension plan at work you will want to read this and if you don't you will still want to because it affects your retirement account. There are two kinds of formal retirement plans that are set in place by employers. The least complicated...

Its dinnertime and the phone rings. It's Joe Noname with SuchNSuch Investment Company and has he got a deal for you. Joe wants to be friendly and engage you in a few not-too-personal questions just to break the ice before he gets into his too-good-to...

We need a rabbit! This was a pretty horrible week for the market with two 100-point days and Friday closing on the lows. During these past few days Sir Alan told us things are looking up and the economy is basically strong. Mr. Market didn't hear him...

When will the stock market stop going down and start up again? If we knew that we'd all be jillionaires. So what do you do now while stocks are going down and stealing away your money every day? What does history tell us? Here is one very interesting...

In 1960 an engineer working for a watch company in Switzerland discovered that a small crystal would vibrate at a constant rate. He found this was so accurate that it could be used to calibrate time so he took it to company management and said it wou...

Wall Street has been preaching for years and years to investors how and where to put their money. The "experts" have put forth these ideas for so long that they seem to be carved in stone just like Moses did with God's 10 Commandments. The only diffe...

There are so many kinds of work that needs to be done and you are doing one of those jobs right now - unless you are one of those two and a half million that have been laid off during the past 3 years. The press continues to blame China and India for...

On November 17 I bought 7 different mutual funds and went to a 100% invested position. One of the funds I bought was Robertson Stevens Information Age (RSIFX) and it has made money as have the other six. My readers know I don't recommend buying indiv...

The Shadow knows. Remember him? It seems a shadow has a firm grip on this stock market. Since the terrible break in mid-April we had a rally and then a decline. Trying to choose a suitable stock or mutual fund has been like grasping at shadows. Two g...

Where is the beef? Or maybe it should be where is the bull? Market, that is? The chief investment strategists and analysts of the major brokerage houses have been promising us a new bull market. So far the bull hasn't come in from the distant pasture...

Now that you have some money burning a hole in your pocket and the stock market is going up you have decided to buy some stock or maybe a mutual fund, but you have the momentous decisions to what to buy. At this point you have three decisions to make...

No, this is not a symbol for some Latin number. The Wall Street mavens talk about this market timing device as if they knew how to use it to determine which way the stock market is going - up or down. It is pretty obvious that brokers, analysts and f...

Yesterday I received my monthly issue of MONEY magazine. This issue has the special feature called "The Ultimate Investment Club" that highlights their picks for the top mutual fund managers. Let's see how their members made money for their sharehold...

You must take the time once a month to review your investment portfolio. It won't take long - less than one hour, maybe 15 minutes. I don't believe the average working person or business owner should own anything but mutual funds because these are th...

You've decided to try your luck at trading stocks or commodities, but so called experts tell you that you need to determine your trading objective. What exactly does that mean and why is it so important? Well, it's really a question of your trading...

Before you embark upon a journey of trading stocks or futures, and before you make any trades, you MUST determine and establish your risk level. Traders that fail to do this are usually doomed from the start. The fact is that most trading accounts ...

So you're started trading, you bought some positions with your online broker, you've set some reasonable stop-losses to protect your account and all of a sudden one of your positions move strongly in your favor - so what do you do now? This my frien...

Suppose your position has made a big move and you moved your stop to your purchase price as recommended. Then let's say your stock continues to make a big move and now we're asking again the questions we asked back in the first paragraph. The first...

Alfred Winslow Jones started hedge funds in 1949. He was a pioneer of non-traditional investment strategies. "Non-traditional" categorizes hedge funds quite accurately. Hedge funds have the potential to make an investor quite a bit of money, but many...

A stock market index is a statistical measure of changes in the securities markets. An index represents a portfolio of securities traded on the market that is considered to be reasonably representative of the market as a whole. Each index has its own...

Stock trading can be a very profitable activity. You can make big amounts of cash in a short period of time. The problem is, that if you don't know what stocks to look for and how to approach them and leave everyting to chance, you could end up wasti...

There is nothing more exciting than finding an undervalued stock and seeing it explode out of nowhere rising in value 100% or more in a few weeks. Some stocks can move as much as 1000% in a year and…. Even after the stock market crashed in 2000, s...