Getting Ahead for the Little Guy
A few years ago, my stepfather (also our financial adviser) talked us into an individual retirement annuity. The cool thing about it was the life insurance aspect of it – if I died, it paid out a certain amount. And otherwise, it was supposed to work as a traditional IRA. I diversified my portfolio between [...]
Short-selling makes markets more efficient, and prices more reliable, several financial professors believe. And try as they might, they cannot finds any evidence of so-called “bear raids” to deliberately drive down prices. Even in the case of “naked shorting” or “failure to deliver” – deviations from standard practice that have been the object of a [...]
Apparently seized, and then sold to J.P. Morgan Chase.
In all likelihood, if I hadn’t been paying attention, I wouldn’t have noticed. No “bank run” needed – though I actually expected this to happen Friday night instead of tonight. The transition should hopefully be nice and transparent.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aWxliUXHsOoA&refer=home
It’s kind of funny to hear of my money referred [...]
With the economy in turmoil, conspiracy theories abound. Especially amongst gold investors, for some reason. Here’s my naïve and simplistic pet theory. It’s my story and I’m sticking to it, at least for the rest of the day. Maybe even tomorrow.
For decades, the limit on government has been addicted to credit – just like us. [...]
… now. Or soon. The economy has been in a major slump, and several markets are in some terrific lows. The news has grim news of collapse and catastrophic failure any day now. And maybe they are right. Things are definitely bad, and there are tough times ahead.
And on the other side of that is [...]
Un-freaking believable.
SEC to Temporarily Halt Short-Selling
Okay. I’m going to cut them a tiny bit of slack here. It sounds like there really may have been some monkey business going on with certain hedge funds. A criminal conspiracy to bring down the U.S. economy? Or just a witch-hunt for scapegoat candidates? Who knows?
Personally, this scares me [...]
“Black Monday” in 1987 was blamed on programmed trading.
The dot-com “bomb” of 2001 was blamed partly upon day traders. The SEC enacted new rules then that we’re living by today that will shut you down if you close out a position the same day you entered it once too often. Unless you have over $25,000 [...]
… sure can screw someone up.
We had a day like Monday, where I was largely out of the market in my trading account (I even have a sizable chunk of my Roth IRA now socked away in cash). The markets dropped over 3% on the whole Lehman Brothers fiasco. Did I say to myself, “Oh, [...]
So a 158-year-old investment bank… Lehman Brothers… considered “too big to fail,” just failed and filed bankruptcy. While the fallout from this is hard to anticipate and may be a long time coming to grips with it, I think there are a few lessons a newbie investor like me can pull out of this.
While I’ve [...]
I just did a quick calculation – unscientific and prone to error. But if the big government bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that just happened this week actually costs over 200 billion, that basically means that every adult in the U.S. has now been stuck with almost $1000 more of their portion of [...]