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Today the news is eerily reporting that the costs of financing Spanish debt and deficits are rising. It's early yet to be sure but it seems that the Faustian bargain of debt and spending that ensnared Greece has a strong chance of roping Spain in too. The reason why Spain is in danger, like Greece b...

I recently read an article that pointed out that in 2011 the Federal Reserve purchased 61% of U.S. Treasury bond issuance. In the markets there is a lot of speculation about another round of quantitative easing (which is sometimes called QE3). Such speculation has kept the equity markets afloat, ris...

We regularly get questions from people wanting to invest in "hot" new companies. Lately all the media buzz about a looming public offering of shares from Facebook has more people than ever wondering how they can get in on the action. The answer usually is: they can't. Think about it: people ar...

Oh, it's still missing!? The $1.6 billion dollars that "vaporized" from MF Global!? Let me refresh everyone's memory as, apparently, a fairly significant "vaporization of capital" warrants only brief news coverage because we have much more urgent things to cover like "The Situation," whoever that is...

As investors, we usually think of political risk relative to international investing - e.g. will Brazil honor contracts or will China steal our technology? But there are more dimensions to political risk these days. Today, House Republicans released their 2013 budget. Now, I don't know what Vegas...

In my previous post I discussed the potential of Apple becoming an income stock. Today the company announced that it would begin paying a $2.65 quarterly dividend, a current yield of about 1.8%. Along with the dividend Apple plans to buy back $10 billion of its stock. I believe returning capital to...

This is a current chart of Apple stock in white on top of a 2007 chart of Google in orange. I am not making any predictions here, but Todd Harrison at Minyanville says it best "We've seen this parabolic frolic before and it was always different--until it wasn't."     Doug Hendee, CFP(R)

What happened to the "news" story that was Dow 13,000? Over the last few weeks as US stock markets rose and the Dow Jones Industrial Average flirted with 13,000 stories filled the financial media. Their content was a typically breathless "will it or won't it" close above that magical mark. Experts o...

Recently, my colleague Brennan published a post relating our current economic climate to that of the 1970's. This concept of a cyclical economy is something that has been studied in great detail for many years. As Brennan posed, history never repeats itself exactly, but there are often many measurab...

  George Eastman was attacking apples before Steve Jobs was born. However, George grew up in apple country (I don't mean Cupertino) and must have had an appreciation for NY State's delicious varietals. There's a very good argument that Kodak was the Apple of its day. So, why is tod...