Before I get into the investing portion of this post, I want to wish you a very happy Halloween! We’ve been gearing up for weeks here in the Halloween capital of the world, Salem, Massachusetts. The town is packed with revelers from all over the country and tonight is sure to bring lots of bewitching [...]

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I am a numbers person–especially when it comes to stock analysis. Every month, I fill up a spreadsheet with 1,000 stocks and 244 columns of data and formulas. I then turn my computer loose, and it goes wild performing two million calculations.
Why so many calculations?
I want the computer to tell me which companies have produced [...]

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I have two main thoughts on the market today.
The first is that the bull market is healthy as a horse, and it will remain healthy until enough people stop arguing with it, questioning it and simply denying it.
The second is that market leadership is probably beginning to narrow, as the identity of the greatest growth [...]

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On Saturday, Sunday and Monday, one week ago, here’s what happened.
On Saturday, the New York Times ran a story on the drug wars in Mexico, describing how the power of the criminal gangs often outweighs the power of the law enforcers.
It’s a big problem, and the violence has increased since President Felipe Calderon launched an [...]

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Kurt Vonnegut, the late, great (and fairly cynical) fiction writer, actually incorporated a unique stock-picking system in his early book The Sirens of Titan.  In the book, a character named Noel Constant builds a huge fortune by investing in stocks that he picks because their ticker symbols match the letters that form words in the [...]

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