Income investors rely on utility stocks for steady dividends. Utilities have earned a strong reputation among income investors, and for good reason. Utilities are widely recognized for their ability to generate steady profits each year, regardless of the economic climate. With their reliable earnings, they consistently pay dividends each year. Many utility stocks have paid uninterrupted dividends for several decades on end, with annual dividend increases along the way. There are many utility stocks on the list of Dividend Achievers, which have raised their dividends for 10+ consecutive years. The other attractive aspect of utility stocks is...
There are currently two important items on the Fed’s wish list. The first is to restore interest rates to more normal levels, and the second is to unwind the Fed’s balance sheet, which has expanded since the great financial crisis, principally through quantitative easing (QE). Is this not just common sense? Maybe. It is one thing to wish, another to achieve. The Fed has demonstrated only one skill, and that is to ensure the quantity of money continually expands, yet they are now saying they will attempt to achieve the opposite, at least with base money, while increasing interest rates. Both these aims appear reasonable if they can be acco...
Actual industrial output has been far weaker than the regional Fed manufacturing reports and the ISM report for at least a year. Yesterday we heard from the Empire State region. Today the spotlight is on the Philadelphia Fed Business Outlook Survey where new orders plunged. Econoday notes “cracks” in the survey. There finally may be cracks appearing in Philly Fed which has, since the election, been signaling break-out strength for the Mid-Atlantic manufacturing sector. The general conditions index looks solid at 19.5, still very strong though down from 27.6 in June and the least robust result since November. But details — which in t...
Since I’m eight, I’ve always been passionate by numbers. When I discover the world of finance, I knew exactly what I wanted to do in life: work around the financial market. I guess that one thing that captivates me is about how the stock market evolves over time. When you are at school, they teach us how the market is efficient and how it’s all a numbers game. Then, you get into the real life and you realize the market is driven by emotion. The worst part is that today, individual investors are not important enough to influence the market in a significant manner. The reality is that professional portfolio manager can get emotional too. ...
Traders must be able to make money even when their opinions are DEAD WRONG! I’d like to show you how your trading can be profitable even when your opinions of the market are DEAD WRONG! Wouldn’t that be nice? It’s possible, and it doesn’t require a fancy options strategy, or any options trading at all! Here’s what recently happen to me, and you can apply the same tactics to your own trading tomorrow. And… if you’d like to learn how to do it even easier, make sure you attend our free live training here… As you’ll see in the daily charts of the 4 major stock index ETFs below the QQQ (Nasdaq 100) got hit hard in the beginn...
Abercrombie & Fitch (ANF) announced plans to launch its namesake brand and Abercrombie kids on Tmall, sending the teen apparel retailer’s shares higher in early trading. TMALL DEAL: Abercrombie & Fitch announced this morning that it will launch its Abercrombie & Fitch and Abercrombie kids on Alibaba Group’s (BABA) Tmall consumer platform for brands and retailers. Hollister, another Abercrombie brand, has been carried by Tmall since 2014, the company said. Effective July 26, Abercrombie will sell its namesake line and abercrombie kids on Tmall, giving it access to 454 million annual buyers across Alibaba’s retail ...
Now we are rallying – patience pays. Who knows how long this rally can last for us, but the market required us to stay patient through all of June and some of July, to finally get a solid sizable rally that we could trade off of. And the market rewarded those with patience by rallying 7 of the last 9 trading sessions and out of the Darvas box we had been stuck in, to new all-time highs. Now the key to this is recognizing it is impossible to know how long and how high this market can go. There are tons of people out there that will claim they know, and I’m here to tell you that they don’t. They are all guesses and not eve...
Actively managed portfolios are not a device of nefarious origin. And neither is it a “dead exercise” as the vox populi has declared. Nevertheless, to be successful at active investing, there are some big time hurdles. Before we discuss these obstacles, let’s first clarify the term “active investor.” An “active investor” is somebody who is managing a portfolio of investments that is different, in both composition and character, compared to benchmark indexes within the same asset class. I rather like how William F. Sharpe, Nobel Prize winner in economics, described it. He wrote: “An active investor is one who is not passive. Hi...
The highest privately valued company Uber is the poster child of ride sharing. One of its strong, regional rivals is Dubai-based Careem, which has recently entered the Billion Dollar Unicorn Club. Careem’s Offerings Careem was founded in 2012 by former McKinsey consultants Mudassir Sheikha and Magnus Olsson. The service was initially set up as a web-based cab booking service for corporate car bookings. But as its users started using its service for personal rides, it transitioned into a consumer-facing cab booking service. The company has expanded its geographic presence outside of Dubai as well. Today, it has over 250,000 drivers in 80 ci...