Thursday, August 22, 2019
July is traditionally a very slow month for the financial markets. Not only is it the prime vacation month for families (most kids go back to school in August), but there’s also the July 4th holiday week. Generally speaking, investors and traders are often far away from the markets at this time of year. Even […]
This is an era of divisive U.S. politics. The House and Senate are split between Democrat and Republican control. President Trump has very firm ideas on policies he wants to implement. There will be another election next year (do they every stop campaigning?) which means less chances the two parties will want to give the […]
Historically, funds holding investment-grade bonds have been considered a safe investment. Lending money to hundreds of well-known companies had little chance of major default and provided interest income. Has your broker mentioned new risks emerging? Bonds ratings fall into two major groups, investment grade and high yield (called junk bonds). The bond rating generally determines […]
The security officer hired to protect the richest man in the world just accused Saudi Arabia of hacking his client. Jeff Bezos, the top dog at Amazon, hired Gavin de Becker to find out how his personal text messages wound up in the hands of the National Enquirer. The story is particularly juicy since Bezos […]
Whether you watched the State of the Union address by President Trump last week or not, you, like me, probably have no illusions that the two parties will accomplish much together in the foreseeable future. One area where they reportedly have common ground is infrastructure repair and maintenance. The numbers certainly argue for a new […]
I receive a lot of questions about getting out of the market before the next economic recession or stock bear market. For many investors there is a constant fear that they will be too late to get out of stocks when the market starts into a deep decline, and much of their portfolio values will […]
In the current stock market, the stocks that look to be the best place to hide are those conservative, dividend-paying stocks. But here’s something about dividend stocks that you may not know, even though I’ve written about this subject before… Dividend growth is much faster overseas than here in the United States. US Dividend Growth […]
The U.S. stock market continues to be led down by former favorites like the stocks that were members of FANG or FAAMG. The reason is quite straightforward – it looks like the rate of growth for many of these companies is slowing. Prime among these companies is Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL), which is in the process […]
I’ll be the first to admit, when I went looking for stocks that would not be impacted by the trade war between the U.S. and China, or a flip-flopping interest rate policy, I did not think I would end up in the for-profit education sector. I viewed the sector as plagued by shaky financials and […]
With the Fed announcement behind us, it’s time to start thinking about how to trade the expected slow increase in interest rates. The next small rate increase is expected in December, and then there could be two or three more incremental increases in 2019. Of course, we can’t predict definitively what will happen. A change […]
