The past three months have been a frustrating time for stock market investors.  After making a major move up from August through February, and even March, the stock market seems stuck in a trading range. Which way will it go? The prognostications on this question are a bit maddening.  Many feel the market will make [...]

Don’t let the Master Limited Partnership name throw you.  They aren’t that hard to deal with.  And I’ve had great success with some MLP’s.  As a matter of fact, I had a fantastic investment in Mark West Energy – which is an MLP. For your purposes, MLP’s trade just like a stock.  By that I [...]

When I was a young boy I remember on warm summer evenings hearing snatches of conversation my parents had with our neighbors the Dunham’s.  Children pick up on all kinds of things like this, as all of you parents already know.  These summer conversations I’m referring to often centered around the Soviet Union, and the [...]

Have you ever wondered what pork bellies are? It’s kind of a funny name for an investment, isn’t it?  Before I got into trading options on commodities I used to hear about them and wonder what they were. Pork bellies are the underside of a pig — the right and left side of the belly.  [...]

You sure hear the “evil speculator” term being thrown around a lot these days.  From the sound of it, speculators are the source of all of our problems.  I swear, I’m just waiting for someone to try to round them all up and burn them as witches or something. But before everyone gets a bit [...]

When you invest in stocks, you actually buy shares of stock.  So what is a share of stock anyway? Let’s think about a pizza pie.  And let’s say you and your friends all chip in and buy a pie together.  So you will all share slices of the pizza pie.  I just said the word [...]

  You hear and read about Wall Street all the time in the news.  And that’s no big surprise.  Because the New York Stock Exchange is on Wall Street. But have you ever wondered how it got that name? Here’s how that happened. When the Dutch had settled in New York around the year 1640 [...]

The New York Stock Exchange is just an auction.  You know, like an auction where there’s a guy talking real fast to a bunch of buyers to sell Grandma Mable’s rocking chair and other furniture so she can move to Florida to be near her grandkids. And different people keep bidding a higher and higher [...]

Many forms of insider buying are completely legal and you can improve your odds of investing success by knowing when it’s happening. Insider buying is a matter of public record and is very easy to research.  One place you can look is in Yahoo Finance.  Just go to www.Yahoo.com, click the Finance option, pick the [...]

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could go to Walmart and buy a money machine? Here’s another way I like to think about stocks.  I like to think I am buying money machines. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could go down to Walmart and pay $49.95 for a money machine.  And you could buy [...]