Oil and gas drillers have really perked up in the year or so since the Deepwater Horizon oil spill sloshed about 200 million gallons of crude into the Gulf of Mexico. As a group, these stocks have returned nearly 45% in the past 12 months and are up almost 6%… Read More

Active trading is a risky endeavor.  To stay one step ahead of the pack, active investors need to continually monitor existing stock holdings while also researching new investment ideas. It takes a lot of time, and for many, simply parking money into an index… Read More

#-ad_banner-#I have a chart I have to show you. Every once and a while, an opportunity like this appears. There’s no way to predict when it will happen. You simply have to be vigilant. The good news is that vigilance usually pays off. Read More

Who among us hasn’t wished for the stock-picking savvy of Warren Buffett? The stock portfolio of the legendary investor has significantly outperformed the market during his 60- year investing career. Buffett’s advice is so highly regarded that an wealthy avid follower recently paid $2.6 million just to have lunch with… Read More

In the fall of 2008, the global economy headed into freefall, helping to push the stock market down to such an extent that a second Great Depression appeared quite possible. Few would have guessed the global economy would be on the… Read More

If you’re an income investor, you’ll want to see this one. This investment…   Pays no corporate taxes Is required by law to pass through the bulk of earnings to investors Acts as a “toll operator” for the transport of America’s most-needed commodities… Read More

If you had a spare $300 billion lying around, then you could acquire Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT), Cisco Systems (Nasdaq: CSCO) and Nokia (NYSE: NOK). Good thing you resisted the urge to do so back in 2000. Back then, it would have cost you nearly $1.2 trillion to buy the three tech giants. Who has that kind of money lying around? Microsoft looks like the relative hero of this group, having only fallen 55% since the end of the dot-com boom. Cisco has lost more than 80% of its value and Nokia nearly 90%. But if every dog… Read More

If you had a spare $300 billion lying around, then you could acquire Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT), Cisco Systems (Nasdaq: CSCO) and Nokia (NYSE: NOK). Good thing you resisted the urge to do so back in 2000. Back then, it would have cost you nearly $1.2 trillion to buy the three tech giants. Who has that kind of money lying around? Microsoft looks like the relative hero of this group, having only fallen 55% since the end of the dot-com boom. Cisco has lost more than 80% of its value and Nokia nearly 90%. But if every dog has its day, then which of these dogs can regain some of the former luster? #-ad_banner-#Nokia and Microsoft: permanent casualties of Apple? Apple’s (Nasdaq: AAPL) stunning growth (its market value has risen from $5 billion in 2003 to a recent $300 billion) has come at the expense of so many other tech companies, though perhaps none have felt the pain as much as Microsoft and Nokia, which were themselves once a favorite brand of tech consumers. These days, the two humbled giants are working together in hopes that their… Read More

In Scarcity & Real Wealth last month, I urged readers to be mindful of China’s ongoing fight to contain inflation. If I were forced to pick a single barometer that could predict the weather for all types of real assets, it would be China’s… Read More

The yield on a 10-year Treasury bond is hovering just below 3%. This means investors earn less than 3% for locking up their money in this security for a decade. Shorter-term rates are even stingier — a three-year Treasury yields only 0.70%, while… Read More