February 2013

Is This the Start of a Bear Market in Gold?

February 24, 2013

Famed investing legends are dumping their gold holdings. George Soros dropped his stash of gold (held in the popular SPDR Gold Trust (GLD)) while Louis Moore Bacon sold all of his gold holdings in his Moore Capital Management fund with the exception of a modest position in a physical gold ETF, Sprott Physical Gold Trust […]

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Unintended Consequences of QE and Low Interest Rates

February 21, 2013

I couldn’t help but notice today’s note from the EIA that if you exclude the 2008 spike in oil prices (to be fair, seemingly a unique anomaly and unsustained) Americans are paying the highest portion of paychecks toward gasoline prices in the past 3 decades.  30 years.  This chart tells the story, but consider the […]

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Bet on Higher Interest Rates with ETFs

February 17, 2013

Interest rates can’t stay low forever? Or can they? This week famed value investor Jim Grant announced to a group of ETF insiders that he was short the bond market, making an explicit call that he believed that rates would rise faster than yields could reward investors. The ETF space offers several opportunities for going […]

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Junk Bonds: Adjusting for “The Great Rotation”

February 10, 2013

January 2013 was marked with the concept of a “Great Rotation” from fixed income to stocks. The premise is simple: after more than 30 years of a bull market in bonds, investors buying today are buying at record low yields. Relative to 2% on a 10 year treasury bond, a dividend-paying stock at a fair […]

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Five types of insurances you should consider investing in

February 10, 2013

The following is a guest post on behalf of Life Insurance: Planning for the future – whatever it may hold – is an important and often neglected part of your overall financial plan. In this piece we’ll discuss five types of insurance policy that can give you a solid financial base to fall back on […]

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Amazon beat Q4 market expectations

February 8, 2013

As one of the world’s leading technology firms, Amazon’s quarterly reports are eagerly anticipated by the markets, and their set of figures for Q4 proved no exception. Following the news that Q4 earnings were higher than expected, their share price shot up by 9% when the markets opened. Gross profit margins for Q4 rose by […]

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Three ways your business can save money

February 6, 2013

The following is a guest post on behalf of Egnyte: Whether you are an SME, a brand new start up or a successful multi-national, figuring out ways to save your business money increases your bottom line and makes for a more successful profit margin. Saving money is almost as important as making it – if […]

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The Buyback ETF that Crushes the Market Year After Year

February 5, 2013

With interest rates at record lows, corporate cash balances at record highs, and tax policy visibility as low as it could ever be, corporate spending on buybacks came in 50% higher in 2012 than the average in the preceding decade. The turn towards buybacks is clear; how it will affect total returns isn’t as certain. […]

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