The last Saturday in April this year marks the beginning of another Berkshire Hathaway annual shareholders meeting. Held at Berkshire’s hometown headquarters in Omaha, the Woodstock of Capitalism grows bigger and attracts more attention each and every year. But beneath the spectacle is an opportunity to hear directly from one of the greatest investors in history. Every year, Buffett holds court with shareholders and the press, fielding questions and giving frank, honest answers with his trademark Midwestern wit. #-ad_banner-#I said this last year, but to put it simply, investors would be wise to pay attention to what Buffett says at… Read More

The last Saturday in April this year marks the beginning of another Berkshire Hathaway annual shareholders meeting. Held at Berkshire’s hometown headquarters in Omaha, the Woodstock of Capitalism grows bigger and attracts more attention each and every year. But beneath the spectacle is an opportunity to hear directly from one of the greatest investors in history. Every year, Buffett holds court with shareholders and the press, fielding questions and giving frank, honest answers with his trademark Midwestern wit. #-ad_banner-#I said this last year, but to put it simply, investors would be wise to pay attention to what Buffett says at this event. At 85 years old, this could be one of the last times we’ll be able to hear straight from the “Oracle of Omaha” about his thoughts on the market, the U.S. economy, and what it means to be a successful investor. Many of our analysts here at StreetAuthority have attended Berkshire meetings over the years, and they all spoke highly of their experience. But one thing that has always stuck with me about Warren Buffett is that while everyone wants to hear him speak, what often seems to be lost is what Buffett actually says… or more importantly,… Read More

I took my son to preschool the other day and, for the first time, he ran off without saying goodbye to me — he just saw his friend and off he went. I walked back to my car wishing I could turn the clock back to a time when my son didn’t want to play with anyone but me. As you probably guessed, this does have something to do with investing. In behavioral finance terms, I was anchoring my expectations to a time that seemed better. In reality, kids grow up and become less dependent on their parents. Change is… Read More

I took my son to preschool the other day and, for the first time, he ran off without saying goodbye to me — he just saw his friend and off he went. I walked back to my car wishing I could turn the clock back to a time when my son didn’t want to play with anyone but me. As you probably guessed, this does have something to do with investing. In behavioral finance terms, I was anchoring my expectations to a time that seemed better. In reality, kids grow up and become less dependent on their parents. Change is inevitable, and I need to accept that. That last sentence also applies to stocks. The companies we invest in will change over time, and we will either accept those changes (the healthy thing to do with both kids and stocks) or fight them. #-ad_banner-# Anchoring can be a costly mistake. Investors often look backward instead of forward. They may see a stock they like drop from $50 to $25 and argue it’s extremely undervalued at $25 since it was a “good” stock at $50. They have anchored expectations to what they believed when the stock was… Read More

Global investors are drooling with anticipation of a tie-up between the London Stock Exchange Group, (LSE: L) and Deutsche Bourse (DB1.DE). This merger of equals would create the largest exchange group in the world, and talks of the merger sent prices for both companies through the roof. On the news,… Read More

The year 2004 was one of the most exciting times of my life. The future looked bright. That was the year I beat out hundreds of candidates to enter an exclusive bond-trading program for a multi-billion-dollar brokerage firm. #-ad_banner-#I was going to dig deeper than ever into the market. I was going to be around market junkies all day. And most importantly, I was going to become a trading hotshot and make a few million bucks before I turned 30. Three years later, two of those things had come true, and one had not… After spending years fully entrenched in… Read More

The year 2004 was one of the most exciting times of my life. The future looked bright. That was the year I beat out hundreds of candidates to enter an exclusive bond-trading program for a multi-billion-dollar brokerage firm. #-ad_banner-#I was going to dig deeper than ever into the market. I was going to be around market junkies all day. And most importantly, I was going to become a trading hotshot and make a few million bucks before I turned 30. Three years later, two of those things had come true, and one had not… After spending years fully entrenched in the markets and learning from the sharpest minds in the business, I learned a valuable lesson: trading is no quick path to riches. The cumulative effect of making a few hundred trades a day for years left me emotionally and financially spent. I found myself at a crossroads. I had loved the market ever since joining the stock market club in sixth grade. I wasn’t ready to walk away from it completely, but it was clear that my relationship with the market needed to evolve. Transitioning out of trading was one of the hardest… Read More

After losing over 20% in 2015, David Einhorn is back with a vengeance.  For Einhorn’s Greenlight Capital hedge fund, 2015 was only the fourth time in its history that it experienced what it calls outsized losses — the previous three being in 1998, 2000 and 2008.  #-ad_banner-#Many have been quick to write off Einhorn, criticizing him for owning some of the worst performing stocks in the S&P 500 during 2015, including SunEdison (Nasdaq: SUNE) and CONSOL Energy (NYSE: CNX).  But since starting Greenlight in 1996, Einhorn’s fund has managed to generate an annualized return of 16.5%. Einhorn is one of… Read More

After losing over 20% in 2015, David Einhorn is back with a vengeance.  For Einhorn’s Greenlight Capital hedge fund, 2015 was only the fourth time in its history that it experienced what it calls outsized losses — the previous three being in 1998, 2000 and 2008.  #-ad_banner-#Many have been quick to write off Einhorn, criticizing him for owning some of the worst performing stocks in the S&P 500 during 2015, including SunEdison (Nasdaq: SUNE) and CONSOL Energy (NYSE: CNX).  But since starting Greenlight in 1996, Einhorn’s fund has managed to generate an annualized return of 16.5%. Einhorn is one of the best investors around, and for good reason.  So how will he be positioning himself to beat the market in 2016? Here are his recent moves:  These Big Names No Longer Make The Grade First and foremost, Einhorn sold off a large chunk of his top holding, Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL). He dumped 44% of his stake during the fourth quarter of 2015.  Einhorn has been an Apple bull since 2010, when he first purchased shares. And since the third quarter of 2013, Apple has made up more than 10% of the Greenlight Capital portfolio. But shares of Apple are… Read More

Large swings in the Dow Jones Industrial Average and other major market averages always seem to increase the level of fear in business news headlines. Here are some good ones we’ve seen in the past: “Panic selling returns to fragile markets” “Investors urged to avoid panic moves as markets plunge” “Chart shows the peak of U.S. investor panic today” #-ad_banner-#I don’t think these headlines truly reflect the attitude of most individual investors. Personally, I believe recent experience has taught many individual investors to take market pullbacks in stride. We’ve gone through two major bear markets in a little more than… Read More

Large swings in the Dow Jones Industrial Average and other major market averages always seem to increase the level of fear in business news headlines. Here are some good ones we’ve seen in the past: “Panic selling returns to fragile markets” “Investors urged to avoid panic moves as markets plunge” “Chart shows the peak of U.S. investor panic today” #-ad_banner-#I don’t think these headlines truly reflect the attitude of most individual investors. Personally, I believe recent experience has taught many individual investors to take market pullbacks in stride. We’ve gone through two major bear markets in a little more than 15 years, and both times the markets have recovered. In the middle of the last major recession, Warren Buffett — one of the world’s greatest investors — wrote an op-ed for The New York Times explaining why he was still buying stocks. It wasn’t because he thought the market had bottomed. In fact, he clearly stated that timing a bottom was not his intent (which was a good thing because he missed the mark by a number of months). Instead, Buffett was still buying stocks because they do well in the long term, even in the face of daunting headlines. Read More

JPMorgan Chase (NYSE: JPM) Chairman and CEO Jamie Dimon made news last week when it was announced he was personally buying $26 million worth of company stock as prices were hitting two-year lows. As The Wall Street Journal put it, his purchase was intended to “boost confidence in [the] banking industry” and “stem the tide of negative sentiment overwhelming bank stocks this year.” #-ad_banner-#​JPM jumped in after-hours trading on Feb. 11 following the news and hasn’t looked back, gaining more than 10% in the past three trading days. The question is whether Dimon’s bold move was enough to turn the… Read More

JPMorgan Chase (NYSE: JPM) Chairman and CEO Jamie Dimon made news last week when it was announced he was personally buying $26 million worth of company stock as prices were hitting two-year lows. As The Wall Street Journal put it, his purchase was intended to “boost confidence in [the] banking industry” and “stem the tide of negative sentiment overwhelming bank stocks this year.” #-ad_banner-#​JPM jumped in after-hours trading on Feb. 11 following the news and hasn’t looked back, gaining more than 10% in the past three trading days. The question is whether Dimon’s bold move was enough to turn the tide in the sector or even just in JPM.  The short answer is no. As we can see on the chart, it’s been all downhill for JPMorgan this year, starting with a breakaway gap to the downside on the first trading day of the year. This is a powerful event that signals a stock rapidly changing its condition from uncertain to undeniably bearish.  JPM then fell as much as 18% through last week’s low, and even after the three-day rally, it remains solidly below its major moving averages.  Had this rally not occurred, there would be no doubt… Read More

All major U.S. indices closed in the green last week, led by the small-cap Russell 2000, up 3.9%, and the tech-heavy Nasdaq 100, up 3.6%.  One of the main characteristics of the market in 2016 has been see-sawing, directionless trading with huge intraday swings. This is a relatively recent phenomenon, as seen in the chart below. The average daily trading range of the benchmark S&P 500 since the beginning of the year is 37.2 points. That is 54% higher than 2015’s average daily trading range and more than double what it was in 2010. This spike… Read More

All major U.S. indices closed in the green last week, led by the small-cap Russell 2000, up 3.9%, and the tech-heavy Nasdaq 100, up 3.6%.  One of the main characteristics of the market in 2016 has been see-sawing, directionless trading with huge intraday swings. This is a relatively recent phenomenon, as seen in the chart below. The average daily trading range of the benchmark S&P 500 since the beginning of the year is 37.2 points. That is 54% higher than 2015’s average daily trading range and more than double what it was in 2010. This spike in the daily trading range, which many attribute to the combination of lower volume and an increase in high frequency trading, has made it more difficult to determine the underlying trend of the market — but it’s still possible. In this week’s Market Outlook, we will take a closer look at some metrics that can help us determine the market’s near- and intermediate-term direction. #-ad_banner-# All sectors of the S&P 500 posted gains last week, led by real estate and consumer discretionary. Defensive utilities and consumer staples, which ironically are the only sectors in positive territory year to… Read More

We’ve received a lot of questions and comments from subscribers in the past few weeks. In general, most are centered on one idea: What to do about the volatility the market has experienced since the start of the year. These questions and concerns are understandable. After all, owning a solid investment does nothing for you if you can’t sleep at night. So I decided to address these questions by talking about an idea that many investors ignore all too often. #-ad_banner-#I’m talking about risk management.  You see, I can’t think of a single investor I know who’s better at managing… Read More

We’ve received a lot of questions and comments from subscribers in the past few weeks. In general, most are centered on one idea: What to do about the volatility the market has experienced since the start of the year. These questions and concerns are understandable. After all, owning a solid investment does nothing for you if you can’t sleep at night. So I decided to address these questions by talking about an idea that many investors ignore all too often. #-ad_banner-#I’m talking about risk management.  You see, I can’t think of a single investor I know who’s better at managing risk than my colleague Amy Calistri. This especially serves her well when it comes to her premium newsletter, The Daily Paycheck. At roughly 60 holdings across the portfolio, and with a mandate to use the power of dividend reinvestment to grow that portfolio into a robust income stream, it’s imperative that she watch each and every one of those holdings like a hawk. As Amy puts it, managing the risk in her portfolio is a far better use of her time than actually worrying about what’s going on in the world or in the… Read More

Earlier this month, Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said his country was in a new Cold War with the United States and its allies in a speech at the Munich Security Conference. Tensions have been building since the beginning of Syrian civil war in 2011 but came to a boil when Russia supported Ukrainian separatists in 2014. Conflict in hot spots around the world have meant a resurgence of U.S. military involvement and even the Obama Administration is talking about an increased military role around the globe. In the five years through 2015, President Obama has overseen a nearly 20%… Read More

Earlier this month, Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said his country was in a new Cold War with the United States and its allies in a speech at the Munich Security Conference. Tensions have been building since the beginning of Syrian civil war in 2011 but came to a boil when Russia supported Ukrainian separatists in 2014. Conflict in hot spots around the world have meant a resurgence of U.S. military involvement and even the Obama Administration is talking about an increased military role around the globe. In the five years through 2015, President Obama has overseen a nearly 20% reduction in the defense budget — but escalating tensions look to ignite another era of military build-up.  #-ad_banner-#Is the United States entering another arms race? Are you ready for the windfall for companies in the Aerospace & Defense industry? Global Hot Spots Mean Military Spending Is Heating Up PM Medvedev’s comments stirred memories of the arms race as it and the United States spar over joint-cooperation to end the five-year Syrian conflict. Russia has blamed the United States and NATO for fueling regional conflicts while the United States and allies contend that Russia is focusing its bombing runs on… Read More