Every investment choice is a compromise.  Either you accept high risks in the hope of high gains, or you dial back your expectations and accept relatively small returns in exchange for increased safety.
I don’t think there are any exceptions to this rule.  None.  And if there were, I’m betting that the SEC would probably want [...]

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Now, a confession.  On any given day, I don’t know the level of the Dow, or the level of the Nasdaq or the price of any stock I’m following.  I simply don’t remember prices.  But I do remember trends very clearly, and I can say with great certainty that today’s stock market is as strong [...]

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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, [...]

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Last year, after much soul-searching, I decided to trade in my trusty 1998 Toyota Avalon in favor of a smaller, better-for-the-environment car. I’d put about 150,000 miles on the Avalon and she was beginning to seem a bit worse for the wear.
I traded in my Avalon for a 2009 Toyota Matrix, a car I’d been [...]

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Believe it or not, when it comes to investing, I’m not a big reader of news and opinion pieces–I prefer to listen to the market itself.  I usually check the headlines but that’s about it.  (Company-specific news is different; I do check the news on all my stocks each day, just to know what’s going [...]

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