China is one of the final great economic frontiers. Its oxymoronic mixture of communism and state-sanctioned capitalism has created a colossal economic engine that had been, until recently, on a sharp upward trajectory. But I don’t think the growth story is… Read More

The Financial Select Sector SPDR (NYSE: XLF) offers a diversified way to invest in the banking sector. The fund’s top 10 holdings include Bank of America (NYSE: BAC), Wells Fargo (NYSE: WFX) and JPMorgan Chase (NYSE: JPM), which make up more than… Read More

The stock market is a fickle beast. Driven by perception rather than reality, it can launch into a multi-day rally at the smallest bullish rumor, or… Read More

In his book “How to Make Money in Stocks,” famed investor and founder of the Investor’s Business Daily publication William J. O’Neill suggested that the performance of the sector and industry in which a stock is categorized ultimately determines one-third of an individual stock’s performance. In other words, just by… Read More

I have a simple question for you… If you could buy 5% of a company and have it turn into 10% of the business — without investing another dime — would you do it? It’s obviously a rhetorical question. Who wouldn’t want their stake in a company to double in… Read More

Hedge fund billionaires are known for two things: Making highly profitable investments that frequently outperform market averages and pushing stocks higher behind huge trading size and… Read More

During the past two years, software developers in Redmond, Wash., have been fine-tuning the millions of lines of code that comprise Windows 8, the latest version of Microsoft’s (Nasdaq: MSFT) ubiquitous software operating system. It’s been an ambitious task, as Microsoft has… Read More

The stock market is a fickle beast. Driven by perception rather than reality, it can launch into a multi-day rally at the smallest bullish rumor, or plunge lower whenever a tiny bit of economic uncertainty arises.  Everyone has a different opinion of what the future holds for the stock market. But lately, the bearish specialists have been presenting a compelling case of why a market downturn is… Read More

The stock market is a fickle beast. Driven by perception rather than reality, it can launch into a multi-day rally at the smallest bullish rumor, or plunge lower whenever a tiny bit of economic uncertainty arises.  Everyone has a different opinion of what the future holds for the stock market. But lately, the bearish specialists have been presenting a compelling case of why a market downturn is way overdue.#-ad_banner-# Because the market acts as an anticipatory mechanism, all the pending good news and potential government stimulus have already been priced into the market, according to these bears. In other words, the market has already moved higher on the anticipation of all possible bullish news.  Another strong point they make is that many companies have only been able to achieve improved earnings by cutting costs, not revenue. This type of creative accounting only offers a… Read More

At least once a day, I am asked what I think about the future of Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) shares. Most of the time I decline to go into a detailed answer, as there are many folks out there who follow the… Read More