The Federal Reserve released their minutes of their late July FOMC meeting, where they told us things look good. This outlook seems to include another bailout. The minutes from the last Fed meeting back on July 28-29 seemed to have a chilling effect on stock markets on Wednesday, which produced a decline that carried on […]

Participation in the stock market used to be limited to investors of real means. Technology has changed all that, and things just got a whole lot more accessible lately. Technology has dramatically changed the way we live, and among the many changes that this has brought, greater and more efficient access to stocks is right […]

Among the stocks that have shrugged off the economic crisis and have prospered though it, nothing compares to the power of online retailers right now, which are red hot. There’s nothing like a recession to depress stock prices, at least normal recessions anyway. 2020’s version, a beast by any measure, has played out a little […]

It hopefully would strike us as absurd to decide never to re-open schools due to fears of communicable disease, but keeping them closed now is no less absurd. As we move closer toward what is normally back to school season, which drives a lot of additional shopping as parents purchase the multitude of things that […]

The numbers are in for U.S. second quarter GDP, and it dropping 32.9% on an annualized basis is the scariest one ever. The stock market hasn’t been scared though. Fear has played a bigger than normal role in 2020, whether that be the massive amount that COVID-19 produced, the panic that hit the stock market […]

State Street’s SPDR sector ETFs were the first to allow investors to invest in S&P 500 stocks by sector, and still are the most popular. Vanguard is right on their tail now though. Many investors take a diversified approach to their stock investments, where they seek a wide exposure to different types of stocks in […]

It’s not that the Nasdaq has hit another bear market or anything, and the 1.1% that this index dropped this week is not even meaningful. The bears are really taking notice though. People seem to be paying a lot of attention to the Nasdaq this week, given that the other two major indexes, the S&P […]

Capitalism has always been at the heart of America, and capitalist opportunity is what has defined the country the most. Current Democrats want to put the brakes on it. The American Revolution that was fought almost 250 years ago arose out of a thirst for the freedom to control our own destiny and to get […]

It should not surprise us that among the good performing sectors this year, the biotech sector is among them, in the midst of a pandemic. Returning to normal isn’t so rosy though. When we focus on a particular sector among a broader stock index, such as the iShares Nasdaq Biotech ETF as a component of […]

The AllianzGI Convertible Fund is touted by fund managers as producing better returns than stocks while having less risk. Don’t believe everything fund managers tell you. In spite of investors thinking that corporate bonds are generic, they do come in several different flavors, including convertible bonds. Convertible bonds are called that because they start out […]