New Year’s resolutions are easy to make and but not so easy to implement. Some common resolutions are to lose weight, to exercise more, and to eat healthier foods. Our intentions are good. In January we’re at the gym, sweating off all those holiday calories. But by March we’re back to binge watching Game of Thrones and Outlander. … More Three Easy Financial Resolutions for 2018
Successful investing is all about predicting the future. Buying shares of companies which will have strong earnings growth. Avoiding those which will get mired down in product recalls, management missteps, or weak demand for their products. But how can you know in advance which is which? It isn’t easy. As I wrote in Money Grab, Picking … More Is Your Crystal Ball Cloudy?
Have you ever been at a party where someone took a big bite of a nacho, then dipped it back into the salsa for another serving? It’s called double dipping. Pretty yucky, right? And not very healthy. You may be doing the same thing with your investing and not even know it. Let’s say to … More Is It Ever Okay to Double Dip?
Exchange Traded Funds, or ETFs, seem to be everywhere these days. They are a low-cost, tax efficient way to invest. They reduce your risk versus investing in a single stock. They can provide ready access to many asset classes, especially for the smaller investor. In my novel Money Grab, I wrote: Clients these days are convinced … More What is an ETF?
Can you make money by investing in a company with no profits? A company that is burning through its cash? A company that keeps issuing new debt to cover its losses? In Money Grab I wrote about Hawthorne Medical, a fictional start-up biotech company that was not making any money, was still in cash-burn stage, but whose … More Tesla Burns Cash as Stock Soars
Financial newscasters constantly talk about benchmarks, telling us about the performance of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, the S&P 500 or the Nasdaq Composite Index. Why should we care about these indices? Are they important to our own financial portfolios? Professional money managers of U.S. large-cap portfolios typically focus on the S&P 500 Index. It … More Why Care About Benchmarks?
If you own a stock that pays a dividend, congratulations! The dividend can provide consistent cash flow to your portfolio. But how do you know when you’ll get the dividend? Companies that pay dividends generally declare them once a quarter, or four times a year. Company ABC may say that a dividend of $0.30 per … More Manage Your Exes
A familiar saying on Wall Street is “Sell in May and go away,” which means you should sell your stocks and move to cash until later in the fall. There is evidence to back up this strategy. According to Doug Ramsey of Leuthold Group, since 1926 annualized stock performance from November through April has been … More Should You Sell in May?
What if your team lost 90% of its games year after year? Would you stick with it? Most active fund managers are facing this dilemma. The SPIVA® U.S. Year-End Scorecard for 2016, issued by S&P Global, shows that over the past fifteen years, the performance of 92% of large-cap fund managers, 95% of mid-cap managers, … More Picking Winning Stocks
March Madness means college basketball, that wild scramble to the final 64-team roster in the NCAA tournament. Sports fans eagerly toss money in the pot and fill out brackets to predict the winner. It’s a classic risk/reward decision – should you bet on the top teams, or go for the long shot? Money Grab has … More The Odds of Madness in March
