Almost all of us hear some variation of this from our credit card or car loan company: your interest rate is a variable rate of 14.99% based on Prime plus 6.74%. That means your current rate is 14.99% but may change at any time, so if the prime interest rate goes up or down 0.5% so will your card....

I’d like to invite you to look at a recent, not atypical, four day chart of a stock. In this particular case, it’s SiRF Technology Holdings (NASDAQ:SIRF). As you can see, the stock gapped down from the $25-$26 it had been trading at to the $19-$20 range. You see this kind of thing all the time when...

Most people invest in bonds because they want to have stable fixed income. Because the performance of bonds are very stable, they also serve to reduce the volatility of the overall portfolio. Depending on the weighting from 0% to 100%, you can reduce your stock volatility correspondingly. With...

One of the reasons I really get into stock investing is that I like to live vicariously through my investments. Say what? Yes, I live vicariously through my stock holdings because I imagine that I'm the owner of the company -- hard at work building it. I become an intimate stakeholder of the...

I recently have been looking at the Bid-Ask Spread (sometimes called the Bid-Offer Spread) to help me determine the right time to add to my positions. Here are some tips I’ve picked up that you might find useful when looking at your stock’s spread. 1. Understand the Numbers There are four pieces...

Mr. Market is an Idiot. On June 21st, I posted an article "Thinking About Garmin" in which I proposed that Garmin is uniquely positioned as the leader in a technology that is "crossing the chasm" from early adopter to mainstream. I was expecting a stellar earning report this week, which is exactly...

Digg, the extremely popular article voting site, is now part of InvestorGeeks! We've recently installed a new feature that will allow you to digg your favorite IG articles right from our site. New articles that we feel are digg-worthy will have the familiar digg box in the upper left corner. If...

Gold & silver, or precious metals (PM) as they are referred to in the investing community, are a kind of commodity. Physical commodity investing is not usually done as a long term investment. This is because a commodity has no value besides its intrinsic value. It will never increase in quantity...

The rapidly rising U.S. trade deficit with China has caused some US entrepreneurial homebuilders to “think outside the box”. Or rather – think “using the box”. The Facts China exported $243 billion worth of goods to the US last year (2005). The US exported only $41.5 billion worth of goods...

There are about as many variations on the moving average as there are investors using them. While it's generally understood that no one configuration is going to be the holy grail of predicting stock prices, each investor has their own baselines or favorites that they come back to. Below, I'll talk...