Once upon a time, a twenty-something American’s finances were pretty simple. You graduated from school, started earning a paycheck, opened a checking account and maybe took out a car loan. Today’s young people, though, have to cope with student loans…

Investment contests are frequently used as marketing gimmicks, but Hedgeable.com has come up with a new twist: It wants to find the worst portfolio in America. To enter, you submit an actual portfolio of three or more securities that you…

“Stable” may not be the first word you’d use to describe your 401k, but it’s the word David Wray uses. In a news release promoting 401k day, the president of the Profit Sharing/401k Council of America says:

The 401(k) system remains stable in…

If you’ve followed the stock market for a while, you’ll remember when the Dogs of the Dow was a popular investment strategy. The idea was that if you bought the 10 highest-yielding stocks among the Dow industrials, you were buying…

If you think you are (or your broker is) smart enough to beat the market, be sure to read Bloomberg’s analysis of recommendations by the top Wall Street analysts. Reporters Lynn Thomasson and Adria Cimino go back to March, just before…

Paul Christopher is among a large number of economists who think we’re close to the end of this recession. He’s also starting to worry about the next one.

Christopher, the global macro strategist for Eclipse Capital Management in Clayton, spoke this…

The handout for Vince Farrell’s breakfast talk this morning looked rather bearish. It started with a recent graph of the S&P 500, highlighting two major bottoms in November and March. Succeeding pages showed previous bear markets — 2001-03, 1981-82 and…

It’s been an unusual, if boring, week for the Dow Jones Industrial Average. It hasn’t gone up much or down much; in fact, it has spent the whole week in an exceedingly narrow range. Wednesday’s closing price of 8,739 is…

The Dow Jones Industrial Average is due for a shakeup soon. The Associated Press reports that General Motors will get kicked out of the venerable index if it files for bankruptcy, as it’s expected to do within the next few days.

Furthermore, St.…

Many of us have a grandparent who swore off owning stocks after the Depression, or a parent who avoided the market after losing money in the 1970s.  It’s a widespread phenomenon, researchers from the University of California-Berkeley and Stanford University find…