Last week we heard the news that Google would pay $1 Billion for 5% ownership in AOL. Here are some bullet points from Google's press release: > - Creating an AOL Marketplace through white labeling of Google's advertising technology - enabling AOL to sell search advertising directly to...

In The Intelligent Investor, Benjamin Graham encourages investors to divide their holdings among two broad types of investment: bonds and stocks. He recommends dividing an investors' portfolio between them from 25% to 75%, depending on the investors' financial goals. Because stocks provide all the...

Last Thursday, Chris wrote about Big Mother Mutual Funds and pointed out some reasons why you might not want to buy the "biggest and best" when it comes to mutual funds. Another problem with large mutual funds is that they lose their flexibility to invest in small-cap stocks. These funds are making...

Relatively new investors may have heard about ETFs but are still unsure what they are. Well, ETFs, or Exchange Traded Funds, are a type of investment fund that is traded like a stock on the open markets, but typically track an index such as the Nasdaq-100 or S&P 500. First introduced in 1989, ETFs...

Pulling out of Index Funds? In last Tuesday's article, I talked about John Mauldin's book Bull's Eye Investing which speculates that we are in the beginning of a secular bear market. I'm just now getting to the part of the book where he talks about what to do about that situation. Among other...

The Real Returns posted an interesting list of the 20 largest mutual funds, and I thought it was interesting, so let me just mention some things about mutual funds. A larger mutual fund is typically an indication that the fund is perceived as more desirable, and as a result investors put more and...

I'm now four chapters through Bull's Eye Investing by John Mauldin. I'll post a full review once I've finished the book, but the basic message is that we are in a secular bear market1. What that means is that, despite the fact that in any given year the market could be up or down, over the next...

Jason and Chris have provided some excellent advice and guidlines when making investments this week. It's imperative that you know what you're investing in not only from a personal standpoint, but also from a market perspective. But that alone is not enough, it is imperative that you can...

Let me present 3 steps to making an investment decision: 1. Make an observation 2. Determine who will profit based on (1) 3. Determine how YOU can profit based on (2) Let's see an example. Observation: The MIT Media Lab has spawned a non-profit organization "One Laptop Per Child"...

Frank, Jason and I were having dinner this past Saturday and we were discussing future markets. Jason brought up Biotech and was talking about some of the possibilities for future advances, and how they may affect the industry. Now, Biotech is something I know very little about --- in fact, I know...