What Are Money Market Mutual Funds

Money market mutual funds are mutual funds that invest in very short-term, highly liquid securities which are considered safe havens such as government securities or T-bills, certificates of deposit, and commercial paper. The funds are easily accessible and are as good as savings accounts in terms of liquidity. Money market mutual funds usually come with [...]

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Should I Buy ETFs Or Index Funds?

This post was originally published on Consumerism Commentary Low cost passive investing is more in vogue than ever.  With last year’s market meltdown affecting both managed mutual funds as well as their low-cost counterparts index funds and exchange traded funds – many investors are asking why they are paying extra money for managers who manage [...]

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What Are Hedge Funds?

Hedge funds are thinly regulated private investment funds for high net worth individuals and institutions. They tend to be extremely quantitative and highly leveraged in their investing approach, coming up with proprietary “black-box” models to determine their trades. Hedge funds became popular in the 1990s when their numbers doubled, but they had a spectacular run [...]

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Will There Be A Stimulus Check In 2010?

2010 is looking like a better year than 2009.  Last year there was doom and gloom everywhere.  Banks were failing or being bailed out, the dollar was falling, the stock market was falling.  Things were not looking good. This year, while unemployment is still high and the economy is sluggish, it appears that the US [...]

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Fixed Income Investments

Fixed income investments are a type of investment or investment asset class that is made up of securities that have a fixed price and pay some sort of interest at regular intervals.  Here are some examples of fixed income investments: Bonds – There are many different types of bonds but one of the more famous [...]

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Foreign Exchange Trading

Foreign exchange or forex rates determine what you get when you swap one currency for another. Tourists going abroad need foreign exchange, an import firm has to keep up with currency conversion rates to pay for purchases overseas, and multinationals need to keep tabs on multi-currency operations. Currencies are actively traded in the fast-paced and [...]

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What Is Private Equity Investment?

Private equity is capital infused into a company without going through an issue of publicly traded stocks or bonds. The money comes from well funded investors – be they individual high-net worth investors or venture capital funds – who seek early entry into a promising start-up in need of seed capital or a young firm [...]

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Financial Statements Analysis

Financial statements give a snapshot of a company’s operations and its financial health.  A study of the four main statements – the balance sheet, income or earnings statement, the cash flow and statement of shareholder’s equity – reveals significant trends to figure out if a company is worth investing in. For the purpose of this [...]

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Growth Investing – A Short Explanation

[Two common philosophies of stock investing are "value investing" and "growth investing" - value investing is covered in another post] Growth investing is a strategy by which an investor buys stocks that are forecast to grow at rates exceeding that of its peers or the overall stock market. Growth investors do so by identifying companies [...]

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Christmas Stocking Stuffer Idea – A Cheap Beginner Investing Book!

This is my review of the awesome book for beginner investers called Investing Made Simple written by Mike Piper who is the author of the investing blog Oblivous Investor. I’ve highlighted both Mike’s blog and book before and I was quite happy to review the book for him. I think it’s a great resource for [...]

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“Top Down” Investment Approach

If you read the business pages or investment in mutual funds you will often hear portfolio managers described as “bottoms up investors” or “top down” in their investment approach.  Here is an explanation of “top down”. The investor using a top down investment approach looks at the big picture. Macro economic variables such as the [...]

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“Bottoms Up” Investment Method

If you read the business pages or investment in mutual funds you will often hear portfolio managers described as “bottoms up” or “top down investing” in their investment approach.  Here is an explanation of “bottoms up” (and no, it nothing to do with alcohol). In the bottom up investment approach, the details matter. An investor [...]

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Calculating Taxes On Capital Gains and Capital Losses

Capital gains taxes In a previous post we discussed how a capital gain occurs when you sell an investment for a profit.  All capital gains are taxable in the year that you sell your investment so you can’t normally “defer” the gain to a future year and you also don’t have to worry about any [...]

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Calculating Capital Gains and Capital Losses

If you sell an investment such as a stock or mutual fund in a taxable investment account, then you might have to pay capital gains taxes on any profit that you make.  This does not apply to a tax-deferred retirement accounts such as 401(k) plan and Roth IRAs. If you make a profit on the [...]

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Stock Purchase – Bid/Ask Prices

This is a more advanced post concerning buying and selling stocks and etfs.  If you aren’t familiar with the subject then you might want to start with market orders and limit orders. If you ever have need to buy/sell individual stocks or exchange traded funds then you should be familiar with the different types of [...]

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More Exciting Facts About Stock Indexes

If you are not familiar with stock indexes then please read this post which explains what they are first. What is a stock index? Stock indexes come in a variety of shapes and sizes.  The most common types of stock indexes are market value-weighted (S&P500) and price-weighted indexes (Dow Jones).  Some determining factors of various [...]

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