A while back, we wrote The College Student’s Guide to Investing, a great tool to help you get started investing. We covered various angles including the importance of starting now, continuing your investment education through continuous learning, and lowering costs through index fund investing. And once you have your accounts setup and funded, what then? [...]
Forget Mint for Money Management, Check Out Personal Capital
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I’m announcing it once and for all right now – my love affair with Mint is now over. It’s still a great free money management tool, but I’ve always had a negative view about how Mint handled investments. It just didn’t do enough for my investments to really help me in my personal finances. And [...]
CarMax Should Lead Used Auto Sales Recovery
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This week’s bullish case for CarMax in Barron’s encouraged me to reopen a CarMax annual report that had been gathering dust on my desk. As the Barron’s article says, CarMax is a differentiated retailer in a very commoditized space – used car sales. Let’s dig deeper into CarMax’s business model to determine whether or not [...]
Is The Bond Bubble Going to Pop?
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Bond prices have been rising steadily since the 2007 financial crisis. Many individuals, investors, companies, and institutions have been flocking to Treasury Bonds for their relative safety compared to other financial products. However, with the economy recovering more every day, and other securities, like stocks, starting to look more attractive, is the bond bubble finally going to [...]
What is a Boglehead?
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While researching my article on The Best Investors of All Time, the term Bogleheads kept coming up when I was researching Jack Bogle. For a quick refresher, Jack Bogle is the founder of Vanguard, and a champion of low-cost simple investing philosophies. However, his basic principles have been extolled upon by several other mainstream finance authors, as well as [...]
Buffett Backs off Municipal Bonds, Should You?
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Berkshire Hathaway is known for its excellence in investing with Warren Buffett at the helm as Chairman and CEO. What Berkshire isn’t well-known for is the business it does best: insurance. Recently, Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway cut its exposure to the municipal bond insurance market. Berkshire Hathaway previously insured billions of dollars of municipal bonds against [...]
Why Do We Sell Low and Buy High? An Interview with Amir Avitzur
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The number one investing mistake that most people make is buying high and selling low. And that is exactly the title of the recent book by Amir Avitzur – Why Do We Sell Low and Buy High? The Guide You Must Read Before You Invest! This book takes you through a journey through the basics of [...]
Do You Make These 6 Investing Mistakes?
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Everyone makes mistakes. But if you learn from those mistakes, it never a bad thing. However, it is even better if you can learn from others’ mistakes and avoid making them in the first place. Here are six common investing mistakes that you could be making right now! Read up, and try to avoid them [...]
How Europe Affects Your Portfolio (And What to Do About It)
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Europe is huge for economic output. All the nations in the European Union had total economic output of $17.6 trillion in 2011. The United States produced $15 trillion of goods and services in the same period. American-European Trade Trade statistics can help us better understand how connected the EU and the United States really [...]
Chaikin Portfolio Health Check Review
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Last year, I reviewed a product called the Chaikin Power Gauge Stock Rating Widget, which provided a ton of great insights into any potential stock you were looking to buy. Well, last month Chaikin Power Tools released a new service: the Chaikin Portfolio Health Check. This service combines the features of the Chaikin Power Gauge and the [...]
Ask The Reader: How Much To Know Before The Wedding?
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I’ve got a lot of friends that are going to be getting married soon (either this summer or next). It seems to be that time in life when everyone is getting married. But an interesting discussion came up with a friend the other day about how much financial information you should really know before the [...]
Avoid Value Traps with these 3 Catalysts
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It’s one thing to find an undervalued stock. It’s another thing to find one that will spring to its true intrinsic value. Many companies are great values. Many are value traps – companies that are cheap, and will be cheap for some time. So how can you delineate between companies that are poised to move [...]
How to Take Charge of an Unruly Portfolio
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If you’re like most people, you have investments scattered across a whole bunch of different accounts – IRAs, 401ks, brokerages, and more. However, every account you own and investment have is part of your portfolio. As such, you need to manage all your accounts as a whole portfolio, and not a bunch of single accounts. [...]
Can We Really Trust Monsanto?
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Monsanto (MON) is probably the most well known, yet obscure company in the world. And if you know who they are, you most likely have a very personal/intense opinion about them. The reason? A big part of Monsanto’s business is genetically modified crops – and there is controversy about how they grow and supply the [...]
How to Roll Over Your 401k When You Change Jobs
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When you change jobs (which many people have over the last few years), you may not quite know what to do about your old 401k. Your old employer most likely didn’t tell you anything, and your new employer may have had one line in the middle of your benefit package. Depending on your old employer’s [...]
Carnival of Passive Investing #18 – Mayday! Edition
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It is the end of May, which could be a huge MAYDAY for the stock market! You’ve all heard the saying: “sell in May and go away”. Well, that saying doesn’t matter a bit because this is the Carnival of Passive Investing, and we’re focused on passive investing strategies for the long term. Remember, 70% [...]
Cash Flow Investments: REITs and Agency Mortgages
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Real estate investment trusts are a favorite among cash flow-seeking investors. By law, REITs must return 90% of their operating earnings back to shareholders in the form of dividends. While this similarity makes REITs look like cookie-cutter investments, they are anything but. Let’s run through the several different types of mortgage REIT investments: Agency Mortgage [...]
Swing Trading Strategies with Alexander Elder: 3 Ways To Profit
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Swing trading has gained some interest lately because it is a popular strategy used to profit on price volatility. It was coined by Alexander Elder, a New York trader who lives off his trading profits and has written a book on rule-based swing trading. Swing trading is highly speculative, and a swing trading strategy to [...]
Dogs of The Dow: Is This Strategy a Winner?
The Dogs of the Dow is an investment strategy with history. Michael B. O’Higgins suggested that one should purchase last year’s losers in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. The methodology is very simple: Each year investors are to: Find the dividend yields of all Dow Jones Industrial stocks. Invest 10% of their capital in 10 [...]
Invest Simply! Unless You Are Getting a Degree in Stock Picking
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This is a guest post from Van Beek of Stock Trend Investing, a blog about getting better stock market trading and investment returns to grow your savings for retirement, college, and financial freedom. You have heard the stories. You have had the thoughts: “If I just would have bought those Apple shares in 2010 I [...]
