In 1999, James Glassman and Kevin Hassett grabbed headlines with their book Dow 36,000: The New Strategy for Profiting From the Coming Rise in the Stock Market. Their timing was impeccably bad. The Dow Jones Industrial Average peaked later that year at 11,900 and didn’t see the same levels again… Read More

Experienced income investors know one of the surest ways to build wealth is to buy stocks that regularly increase dividends. This is because dividend growth can turn even low-yielding stocks into big income producers over time. For example, consider the… Read More

In the last few years, we’ve seen the demise of such retailers as Bombay, Linen & Things and Circuit City. These firms were ill-equipped to handle the duel pressures of a slowing economy and the rising pressure of Amazon.com (Nasdaq: AMZN), Wal-Mart (NYSE: WMT) and other retailers. And… Read More

I’m not an alarmist by nature, but there’s no denying we’re in a food crisis. How else would you explain angry demonstrations in Mexico protesting exorbitant corn tortilla prices or the fact that Pakistan called in the military to guard flour mills? The recent… Read More

It’s never prudent to cause undue alarm. This is why European policy makers continue to speak of tactics and strategies to help Greece avoid any economic meltdown that would lead to bond defaults and a departure from the euro. To speak publicly of these… Read More

Do you remember the old commercials for brokerage firm E.F. Hutton back in the 1970s and early 1980s? They always ended with the announcer saying, “When E.F. Hutton talks, people listen.” In every advertisement, a pair of affluent-looking friends or co-workers would be discussing investments in some… Read More

Imagine a restaurant that is so unclean, health inspectors wouldn’t allow it to reside in the same shopping center as other eateries. Well, this is just what investors have found when searching for stocks listed in the “Pink Sheets.” These stocks aren’t allowed anywhere… Read More

Yield-starved investors are wondering where they can capture high yields when a savings account pays 0.5%. A certificate of deposit (CD)? A 1-year CD pays 1.2%, according to BankRate.com. That doesn’t even keep up with… Read More

If the past decade was one for the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India and China), then is this the decade of the CIVETS (Colombia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Egypt, Turkey and South Africa)? That was a notion I explored last summer in this article. Now, it’s time to take a… Read More

Pacific Life Insurance Co., better known to investors as PIMCO, was co-founded by Bill Gross back in 1971 and has grown into one of the largest and most well-respected bond managers in the world. As of the end of March, it managed nearly $1.3… Read More