Pension plans have long been offered as part of employee benefit packages. Long thought to be an integral part of any retirement plan. But in todays environment, with large corporate bankruptcies and massively underfunded pension programs, do you still rely on your Pension plan?
Today, and the past few days have been hectic for the market. The price of oil keeps rising and I need to sell my gas-guzzling van. So do we panic yet and where is the market going? Over at HipEgg we did a review of the Dow.
I don’t know if a TA is the right tool for the over all market, I don’t know that it isn’t. If TA is correct then we are testing support and could be looking at a correction soon but that is not the point. The point is, there is profit to be made in panic. As the aged Templar said to Indiana “You must choose, but choose wisely.”
Happy trading.
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)
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.
According to the latest stats, American home prices are still on the rise - in most major markets across the nation.
The National Association of Realtors published a median increase of 4.2% from 1/06 to 4/06. Compare this figure to the published 16.6% last year.
Although prices appear to be leveling off, many economists don’t predict a sour turn for the worst.
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Know the best credit cards for bad credit? Looking for the cheapest cash-advance loans? Interested in FOREX trading?
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