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Books

Recipe for a Bull Market

November 8, 2011
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Recipe for a Bull Market

Remember the crash of 1907? Probably not. Everyone talks about the Crash of 1929, but no one talks about the Crashes of 1937, or 1907, or 1873, or 1857 … or others. And why not? Because we like our lessons familiar and simple.  And the lesson of the Crash of 1929, in simplified form, was that the Roaring ’20s had fostered a time of excess wealth and market speculation–much of it on margin; and that as buying dried up and sellers took control, the domino effect brought a big long crash, the eventual evaporation of billions of dollars in...

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Two Ways to Play the Tablet

October 24, 2011
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A few years ago, I was very skeptical of e-readers, as I wrote about a few times in this space. I saw hurdles that they needed to overcome before I would ever consider getting one. Since then, e-readers have improved greatly and I was swayed enough by the changes to acquire one! I still have some gripes with e-readers (the commitment you make to one technology and the difficulty sharing books), but I really enjoy their small, light size, lower prices and that you can now check books out of the library using the Amazon (AMZN) Kindle, my e-reader...

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What the Experts are Saying

October 10, 2011
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“Tim Geithner should be put in jail with Bernie Madoff.” “The United States is Canada’s Mexico.” “You should register your stocks in your own name, as protection against the time when the Internet crashes, and stock ownership records are lost. ” Those are just three of the unusual–and unusually candid–remarks I heard last week at the 49th annual Contrary Opinion Forum in Vergennes, Vermont. It was my 23rd year of attendance at the forum, and I was fortunate to meet many old and new friends there. But the heart of the forum is the talks by some of the...

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One Good Idea

August 29, 2011
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Cabot’s founder, Carlton Lutts, was known to say about reading books,  “All I’m looking for is one good idea.” We get a lot of requests asking about which investing books are best, so today I’m going to share the Cabot editors’ favorites. Recommended by Michael Cintolo, editor of Cabot Market Letter and Cabot Top Ten Weekly: Reminiscences of a Stock Operator by Edwin Lefevre If you consider yourself a student of the market, there is no better book than Reminiscences of a Stock Operator.  This conversational biography of the exploits of Jesse Livermore contains more market lessons than any...

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A Top Stock Pick for 2011

August 4, 2011
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Today’s stock pick is inspired by a few good articles I’ve read lately: two about very good businesses, and one about a bad business. Let’s start with the bad news: Borders is going out of business. According to most sources, Borders simply couldn’t compete with Amazon.com (AMZN) and other online book retailers. The company’s own announcement of its decision to liquidate cited three “headwinds” that led to its demise: “the rapidly changing book industry, eReader revolution and turbulent economy.” But there had to be another problem as well: Barnes & Noble (BKS) is facing all those same challenges, and...

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