Asian Heart Attack
(From 8/25/2015) About last week’s column, one of my friends said he agreed with me. Which parts thereof, I am not sure. I stressed the improving American household financial health and in particular, housing growth and debt reduction for everyone but the federal government. I also said I thought the [...]
Summer Doldrums
As I have described before, this calendar is destined to be unusual in one way or another. The January indicator, looking at the first few days plus the month as a whole, gave us a prediction of being a lousy year for the stock market. On the other hand, the [...]
Lifelong Learning
Area students will go back to school in the next couple of weeks. Since there are likely not many of them that are readers of this publication, I’ll gloss over the Bureau of Labor Statistics 2014 information that the $488 median usual weekly earnings for those with less than [...]
Another Day, Another Direction
I have a few friends in my age group who absolutely love to ride roller coasters. Some travel the country to ride a new one when it opens. But when it comes to investments, people who like volatility are scarcer than hen’s teeth. (I am using that comparison since I [...]
How to Conquer Your Debt
Last week I discussed the Greek debt situation and compared my own painful education in the college of life experience. But many people may not know how to make the changes necessary to control, manage and eliminate their debt over time. Hopefully this will be helpful information for persons who [...]
Debtor Blues
The Greeks have thumbed their collective nose at the EU leaders. They are tired of being kicked around and by golly, they aren’t going to take it anymore! The word tantrum comes to mind, but since they are mostly adults—why would any young people stay in Greece?—and they have the [...]
Head Spinning Times
I personally like studying history because, as written in Ecclesiastes 1:9, What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. This week we have learned the Greeks would rather not pay their debt owed mostly to European banks. [...]
New Challenges Are Opportunities
Last Monday at the international Million Dollar Round Table annual meeting, New York Times columnist and author, Tom Friedman talked about his soon-to-be-published book. His talk entitled The World Is Flat 3.0 had something for everyone. His original work, The World Is Flat, published in 2005 stressed that many past [...]
Where Is The Top?
There are two primary schools of thought about investing in modern markets. The first and dominant is what I call Live Long and Prosper with deference to the late Leonard Nimoy, Dr. Spock of Star Trek. It prescribes being fully invested at all times no matter what is occurring. If [...]
Important Investing Criteria
If you are a DIY kind of person in investing, you need to determine what criteria to use in evaluating choices. This is somewhat easier for individual stocks, but there are also yardsticks of various kinds for mutual funds. The Price to Earnings ratio (PE) is one of the most [...]