Let’s take a clear-eyed view of how stocks are going to pay for your retirement. Because I think most people have kind of a muddled view. Indeed, there’s a muddled view about stocks in general.  That is to say, the most common view seems to be that  you get some kind of hot tip on [...]

With the markets moving up and down these days, we want to protect ourselves and try to keep from losing our money when things start going south. So one way we keep our money is we “stop” our losses.  This activity is actually called setting a stop loss, so that’s a new term for you [...]

I think many people are a bit intimidated about trading their own stock account online.  And I can understand that.  It seems easier to call your broker and let him worry about placing your order – correctly. But it’s really not that hard to do.  And after you’ve done it a few times, it’s actualy [...]

Much is being said these days about tax fairness and the 1% not paying their fair share.  I kept hearing so much about this that I decided to do something quite radical, and unusual, in our national discourse on the subject. I hope you’re sitting down for this. What I decided to do was actually [...]

Rather than rushing out to buy a stock I’m excited about at the market price, I use the Good Til Canceled method of placing an order. For example, if you wanted to place your order for the Sprint stock at $4.50 a share, even though the market price was $5.17, you could do it by [...]

Using quality financial newsletter recommendations can greatly enhance your investment success in the stock market.  Here are some of the newsletters I‘ve used off and on through the years.  In my opinion, these guys are some of the rock stars of the financial newsletter business. I’m sure there are many other good ones, but it [...]

Good financial newsletters can be a real key to your stock investing success.  But not all newsletters are created equal. I look for a few key items in a newsletter.  They are … A story The recent and historical company performance The researcher’s rational for why it should do well in the future A specific [...]

For my money, I go with paid financial newsletters — every time. There are many knock off newsletters out there that are not good, so I’ll go into detail reviewing the ones I have had good success with in future posts.  You might want to consider some of them too. But before we get into [...]

Remember that when you invest in a stock, you are buying a business.  You are becoming a business owner. No smart business person would buy a business without doing some serious research first. They would want to know what the sales were, if the sales were increasing every year, how much profit those sales were [...]

When I was in my early twenties I began wondering how people made money.  No, not “made money” as in at a job.  I had a job as a computer programmer back then.  So I knew how to earn a wage. But I was trying to figure out how people accumulated real wealth. I knew [...]