With the SEC making the offering of annuities in companies’ 401(k) retirement plans easier, we are now scrambling to make this type of investment more transparent. There is something particularly tempting about annuities that appeal to a lot of people, for the same reasons that they loved fixed benefit pension plans. There is no doubt […]
What does the left-wing branch of corporate and antitrust law look like? Wayne State law professor Sanjukta Paul gives us a glimpse, and it’s a pretty strange world indeed. You would think that capitalism and socialism would make strange bedfellows. Capitalism is based upon the combination of property rights and free exchange, where the law […]
Oil giant Exxon Mobil has increased its dividend for the last 17 years without fail. They want to increase it again this year. They don’t have the money, so they are going to borrow it. Stock dividend payments are a way that companies pay profits directly to their shareholders. When a company earns money, they […]
Ralph Nader is at it again, and he’s now accusing the stock market of promoting “casino capitalism.” Could it be that Mr. Nader is starting to figure out this a little more? Ralph Nader noticing that the stock market is like a casino might be one of the funniest remarks ever made about it. The […]
If the stock market was really concerned about things like valuation, the coronavirus offered the bears a perfect opportunity to flee. The bulls are still carrying the day. In the midst of what was a dramatic selloff in the markets that coincided with concerns that China’s response to the coronavirus threat that they are battling […]
Calling the way that we advise those who consider themselves to be “income investors” clueless doesn’t quite fit. Clueless means knowing nothing, but this is worse than that. There are degrees of badness when it comes to investment advice, but there’s nothing that even comes close to the way that those who consider themselves to […]
Value funds seem to take a defensive approach to investing by steering away from good performing stocks and favoring poorer ones. This isn’t that good of a deal though. It’s a given that value fund investing will provide lesser returns than average, not that the average is something that we should be setting our sights […]
Back on January 24, the stock market began to buckle under the force of the coronavirus, we told you it was time for gold, but bonds have been picking up as well. Investors tend to hold a lot of bonds, presumably for a rainy day, although given that the sun shines most of the time, […]
Many investors wish to keep their long-term stock positions for tax reasons, but this involves taking on the full risk involved. Managing this with futures can make sense. It’s pretty easy to manage your positions in stocks just by moving in and out of them as needed. While stocks in general gain in value over […]