Insights

Between Friday and Monday, the price of gold has fallen 12.75%. Why? 1) Cyprus is considering selling some of its gold to help pay for the bailout. While that is a relatively small amount, there are worries that bigger countries like France and Spain might consider...

President Obama proposed today that no one should be able to have more in their tax-advantaged retirement accounts than what it would take to purchase an annuity paying $200K/year. Today, the savings needed to generate that is roughly $3 million. The government would...

Today is turning out to be a nice day in the markets. Indexes (or indices, if you prefer) are up 1% - 1.5% in the U.S. Not only is it fun gaining more than 1% in a day, but this is a new high for the year, after being flat for the last month. Usually, flat action that...

Things are not always what they seem, Alice. Since last Friday's unemployment rate shook people up some and is in the news, let's see if it really tells the story. Below are two charts from the Federal Bureau of Labor Statistics current website http://data.bls.gov....

The U.S. stock market had a good day, back up to the high it hit a couple times in the last ten days but no further, at least yet. This is simple consolidation and it says nothing about whether stocks will go up more or fall back. The idea that stocks move every day...

So, who cares about Cyprus, other than Russian tycoons that keep their money there? Well, any investor that cares about the health of the European Union and the value of the Euro should care. That's because it may be, and there has been some confusion on this score,...

One of the chief failings in investment choices in retirement plans is the lack of fixed income choices. Why it is that companies offer 18 different stock funds and 1 or 2 income funds is beyond me. Generally, there is an intermediate-term bond fund like PIMCO Total...

The EU has set a deadline for a Cyprus bailout. Of course, deadlines were made to be broken in this sort of negotiating. And you thought it was strange that Greece, a small part of Europe's economic output was pretty small to be moving markets around the world! How...

The U.S. stock markets followed the lead of Asia and Europe and rose today, up about 2/3%. That puts them back near the high of the year. Over the last week, stocks have sort of stalled and as I wrote a week ago, a flattening and even a slight drop was to be expected....

The tiny country of Cyprus, which as you know is just an island in the Mediterranean Sea, and is one of the countries in the Eurozone, made news this weekend by announcing a bailout plan for their government that included taxing bank deposits to the tune of as much as...