Sleazy Wall Street practices continue

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on Aug 24, 2009 in Best of the Blog, Blog | 1 comment Monday’s Wall Street Journal carried a story about a sleazy practice on the part of Goldman Sachs. The piece states that Goldman analysts regularly report stock tips at “trading huddles” in advance of a public declaration in research reports. This would not be a big deal but frequently the Firm’s traders are in attendance at these meetings and they often call...
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Take a breather

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on Aug 14, 2009 in Best of the Blog, Blog | 1 comment The financial markets have had several sizable selloffs in the last week. Thank goodness. Because the second quarter earnings season is essentially over, the emphasis now shifts from responding to the economic-wide insights provided by businesses in their earnings reports, to raw speculation and response to actual economic news. In other words, there is less overall news and more speculation. In...
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Mixed messages

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on Aug 10, 2009 in Best of the Blog, Blog | 2 comments I have been reading the business and economic news with interest over the last several weeks. Increasingly there are a lot of stories that contradict one another in the same newspaper and on the same day. This reporting regards the state of the economy and usually centers on a quote from several prominent market prognosticators. In other words, the news stories are not factually based, but...
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Investing in the stock market makes sense, part 4

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on Aug 8, 2009 in Best of the Blog, Blog | 5 comments This is the final edition of why investing in the stock market makes sense. ***** Liquidity Another advantage of investing in the stock market vs. other types of investments is liquidity. Even for thinly traded shares of stock, it usually only takes a day or two to sell your interest in a publicly traded firm. Compare this to trying to sell a house, office building, baseball cards, art, gold...
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Investing in the stock market makes sense, part 3

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on Aug 7, 2009 in Best of the Blog, Blog | 6 comments This is the third part of the “Investing in the Stock Market Makes Sense” series. How is it that publicly traded businesses can regularly grow their earnings at a pace significantly higher than that of GDP? After all, isn’t GDP the aggregate measure of all economic growth (i.e. profits) in the economy? And don’t the publicly traded firms represent a disproportionate...
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The PMI numbers are improving

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on Aug 7, 2009 in Best of the Blog, Blog | 0 comments OK, by now it’s a broken record: Jason sees signs of recovery. Sorry. Some of these numbers need watchin’ and well, due to a horrible chemical accident I don’t have eyelids, so I can’t help but watch. Hah! What the heck is the PMI? PMI is short for the Purchasing Managers’ Index and is an economic indicator of production. The number is based on a monthly survey of...
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Investing in the stock market makes sense, part 2

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on Aug 6, 2009 in Best of the Blog, Blog | 0 comments Part 2 in a series. So the first reason why investing in the stock market makes sense is that businesses, in the aggregate, ought to keep pace with the growth in Gross Domestic Product. There are many ways as an investor to capture the growth in wealth generated by businesses; for example: stocks, preferred stocks, bonds, warrants and options. But let’s just talk about bonds and stocks....
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