Articles filed under 'News & Interest'
Whether it’s due to bad or irrational decisions, youthful naiveté, a bad streak of luck, or situations totally beyond our control, we’re all faced with mounting debt at some point.
If it gets bad enough, some of us may even have to work with our creditors to forgive some of our debt just to remain solvent. But did you know that getting a break on your debt could greatly effect your tax situation? How about the effect of accepting a settlement offer has on your credit report?
Today President Bush signed into law a bill that is designed to encourage 401K participation. There are many good points to this bill and estimates are that it will increase the number of people participating in retirement plans. The numbers are still foggy but you are looking at anywhere from 30% to more then double the current number of 401K investors.
Stocks rarely trade at what the company is worth. They generally trade at what people think they are worth – to a point. If you recall your basic Econ 101 classes, then you’ll realize that soon demand for stocks should start to rise as more new investors will be forced into the market. Mutual fund managers will have a wonderful problem of excess capital flowing in.
For those of us already in the market, and I hope that is everyone reading this site, it should be a good ride ahead. I am hopeful anyway.
Further Reading: Pension reform - Boon for 401(k)s by Jeanne Sahadi
Friday, Aug. 18, 2006
by Kevin
It was Thomas Jefferson who said: “Every generation needs a Revolution.” He was, of course, talking about the fact that every few years there comes a time where the old administration must be replaced by a newer one in order for our nation and liberty to survive. Every four years this nation has an opportunity for a revolution of sorts.
Soon in 2008, whether you love them or hate them, the old administration will be gone. What does this mean for the investor? It is impossible to predict all the possibilities that will flood in when a new President, and therefore a new vision, takes the oath on those gleaming white steps. Wal-Mart however is hedging its bets.
Howard Lindzon “smells a rat” at TheMoneyBlogs.com:
I called Brice (owner of TheMoneyBlgs), who picked up his own phone and asked him some questions. I immediately smelled a rat. Trading Markets will take my content and brand it in moneyblog design and keep all the advertising dollars from the aggregated data.
I love blogging and don’t mind doing it for free, but this is just plain sneaky.
If you run an investing, personal finance, business, or “money” blog, you’ve probably gotten an email from Brice Wightman of TheMoneyBlogs.com. InvestorGeeks got one, and we initially signed up since we’re proud of the relationship we have with a similar service pfblogs.org. But once we found that TheMoneyBlogs would not include a link back to our site the original article, we immediately removed ourselves from their network.
So how can you make these aggregators work for you? Find out how some people are trying to make TheMoneyBlogs work them. More importantly, I’ll go through some questions you can ask yourself to determine up front if a blog aggregator is really offering a win-win situation.
After launching in February as the first person-to-person lending site in the US, Prosper.com has seen a good deal of activity. Now that it’s been 6 months since they opened their doors, I used Google Blogsearch to see what people’s experiences were out there in the blogosphere.
Renault saved Nissan in 1999. The partnership now boasts the highest profit margins in the industry. GM took a $10.6 billion plunge last year. Can the powerhouse French / Japanese duo rescue the US’s largest auto maker?
WebWord has a good write up about Professor Feng Li who data mined the annual reports of 34,180 companies with some interesting results. Li counted the number of times words like “risk” and “uncertain” showed up in the reports and compared the data to previous years.
Professor Li discovered that a “big jump in words related to risk is usually followed by poor share performance” which makes a ton of sense. He built a model portfolio based on this data. The punch line is that he would have outperformed the S&P 500 index by 6% per year since 1995. Smashing!
Has anyone seen other analysies like this one? What else can we “data mine” to read the market?
We linked to WebWord before, for John Rhodes’ opinions on Microsoft and Web 2.0. (our article)
Monday, Jul. 10, 2006
by Jason
Some people are saying that you can track the real estate market by how many new realtors there are signing up. “When everyone thinks they will get rich selling real estate,” they say, “that is when the market will fall.”
Charles Turbiville has some advice for people wanting to get into the real estate game now, but you might want to reconsider. Charles has some scathing words for what he sees as a typical realtor:
Companies like [Redfin and Igglo] will expose the Real Estate Agency Industry as the “we know that you are stupid, and that buying a house is scary so we will drive you around town and hold your hand at closing and give you a dozen business card with my ugly face on them to hand out to you friends because all I care about is marketing myself, not selling your home. Actually if you never sell your home, that is fine, because I will take every potential buyer that I talk out of buying your house to a dozen other houses in the neighborhood and maybe I can list their house too, and do the same thing to them, and pass out a thousand more butt-ugly business cards to all of their potential buyers in the process and maybe we can sell your house before the listing expires, because ‘you’ve got to list to last’” business that it is.
Normally, I wouldn’t pay too much mind to a statement like this. It sounds like the typical rant of a dissatisfied customer. But then, Charles isn’t a disgruntled home seller; he used to be a realtor himself.
Wednesday, Jun. 28, 2006
by Jason
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So what do you do with all of your billions?
If you’re Warren Buffet, you give it all away. Warren Buffet has announced that 85% of his holdings in Berkshire Hathaway will be donated to charity in the coming years. With the lion’s share going to The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
More can be found at CNN
Sunday, Jun. 25, 2006
by Frank
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Can you tell I’m happy and proud to be an InvestorGeek? Though I’m one of the new writers here, I have been blogging about investment and finance issues for a while now. Nevertheless, I am excited and looking forward to sharing with you some of my thoughts on investing. Why did I decided to join with the geeks? For that, let’s go back to Wikipedia’s defintion of a geek:
A geek (pronunciation /gi:k/ ) is a person who is fascinated, perhaps obsessively, by obscure or very specific areas of knowledge and imagination.
It’s hip to be geek nowadays! Just look at the varieties we have — music geeks, movie geeks, gaming geeks, singing geeks. Even when I was young, the foundation was being laid out for me to become the InvestorGeek that I am today.
