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 [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

Moving on to a lighter topic, last week marked the start of business for Pet Airways, a privately-funded company that will fly your pet in the main cabin of their aircraft–not in the baggage hold–between New York City, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Denver and Los Angeles.
Founded by Dan Wiesel and Alysa Binder and funded by private [...]

[Read more →]

All of the movement toward renewable energy and slicing carbon output represents a profitable opportunity for investors. One Green stock I particularly like because it has a dominant position in a product that is used in solar and wind power systems as well as hybrid vehicles.
It’s Maxwell Technologies (MXWL), a San Diego company that has [...]

[Read more →]

China is a country that, as we all know, is changing fast … but is still misunderstood.
While writing the title of this column, I was tempted to use the word xenophobia, meaning fear or contempt of strangers or foreign peoples.  But the word I want (which appears not to exist) means, “underestimating the power of [...]

[Read more →]