Investing

Getting the Basics Right When Investing

Investing Basics

Those who promote conventional approaches to investing are constantly trying to school us on it, but the most important part of learning is being willing to ask the right questions. There has been a movement afoot ever since we got the ability to trade ourselves on the internet. It wasn’t really that long ago when […]

Trying to Beat the Market is Not for Amateurs

Investing and Markets

There is a whole industry out there that seeks to beat market returns. This is not a task for amateurs, although a lot of amateurs don’t know they are amateurs. We continue to marvel at how many who think that they have what it takes to beat the market fail at this miserably year after […]

Tesla Wobbles as it Finally Gets Admitted to S&P 500

Tesla

Being the sixth most valued company by the stock market should definitely qualify as being in the big 500. Tesla simply grew so large that this big gorilla could not be ignored anymore. Like all stock exchanges, the benchmark S&P 500 collection of the country’s large cap stocks does change its collection from time to […]

Stocks Hit Records as U.S. Dollar Continues to Drop

Stocks hit records

Most people have enough trouble understanding how stocks work, but when you throw in the effects of changing values in the U.S. dollar, things really get confusing. To most people, stocks and the stock market do not seem so hard to understand. When we own a stock, we own a piece of the underlying business […]

Is Pfizer Stock Really Soaring on Vaccine News?

Pfizer

As so many are reveling in the apparent success of Pfizer’s vaccine trials, we might think that their stock should be going crazy. Lots of craziness, none related to the stock. The headline from Bloomberg when the news of Pfizer’s COVID vaccine achieving a 90% efficacy rate claimed that Pfizer’s stock was “soaring,” and many […]

Investors Need to Beware of Biden’s Storefront Platform

Joe Biden

Many, including the presidential candidates themselves, overestimate the scope of the office. A more ominous threat to stocks and the economy lies behind the curtain. It’s all too easy to stop at Joe Biden’s campaign platform when it comes to assessing the damage that his being elected president will bring to the stock market and […]

Wisdom Tree Still Promising a Better Way to Invest

Wisdom Tree

Professor Jeremy Siegal can often be seen in ads promoting Wisdom Tree’s Modern Alpha approach to investing, but how well does his funds deliver on this? Wisdom Tree got into exchange traded funds in 2006, promoting them as “modern alpha” funds. In investing, alpha is the tendency towards price growth, where high alpha investments have […]