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Monthly Archives: September 2009

Many Ways to Play Gold

September 22, 2009
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Many Ways to Play Gold

Fundamentally, I’ve thought gold has had a great story for many months.  After all, there are only so many billions of dollars that governments can spend and use for bailouts, and there’s only so much money the world’s various central banks can print, before investors begin putting their money into hard assets instead of paper currencies.  Heck, I’m no deficit hawk, but projections of trillion-dollar deficits in the U.S. alone for the next few years do not spark confidence in the Greenback.  Many other countries are in the same boat. But gold prices really didn’t budge much during last...

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The Longer the Base the Longer the Race

September 21, 2009
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The Longer the Base the Longer the Race

Now back to the market.  As most of you know, I use charts on a daily basis, but I hesitate to call myself a technician.  Technicians, or technical analysts, rely heavily–sometimes exclusively–on charts to find stocks to buy and tell them when to sell.  And they usually look for certain patterns–triangles, coils, pennants, ascending structures, etc.–to foretell where a stock or market is heading. To me, those types of patterns aren’t overly reliable; sometimes they work, and sometimes they don’t.  Instead of trying to predict the future, I prefer to use charts to help with simple supply-and-demand analysis–I look...

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What can be Learned from Last Year’s Market

September 20, 2009
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What can be Learned from Last Year’s Market

This month brings the two-year anniversary of Cabot Small-Cap Confidential and in honor of that, I’m bringing you a multi-part series with Editor Thomas Garrity.  Today Tom will explain how the economic climate factors into his stock picks and what he learned from last year’s bear market. I hope you enjoy it! (You an read the previous issues here and here.) Question: What would you say to an investor who has been scared off by last year’s bear market? Answer: It’s OK for investors to be scared off by a bear market as long as they are using their...

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Where the Stock Market is Now

September 19, 2009
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Where the Stock Market is Now

This month brings the two-year anniversary of Cabot Small-Cap Confidential and in honor of that, I’m bringing you a multi-part series with Editor Thomas Garrity. Today Tom will explain where he thinks the market is going and his favorite investing book. I hope you enjoy it! (You can read the previous issues here and here.) Question: What is your current outlook on the stock market? Answer: My stock market outlook for the near term is tempered, turning more optimistic beyond the next 18 months. There are many indicators we can employ to determine the future movements of the stock...

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Highest Growth Rate Ever for Indicator

September 18, 2009
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Highest Growth Rate Ever for Indicator

As I’ve done a couple of times, I’m going to start my Wealth Advisory with a quick update on the ECRI Weekly Leading Index.  I first wrote about it back in November of last year, and back then, my point was to alert you to the fact that the economy was, without a doubt, going to recover.  Now, of course, most people are coming around to that view. Interestingly, however, the Weekly Leading Index has continued to soar.  As of last Friday, the Index’s growth rate, which measures its rate of change during the past six months or so,...

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