Melco Crown Entertainment Update

A while back, I wrote about why I thought Melco Crown Entertainment (MPEL) is a good long-term stock to hold, despite the short-term technical weakness I saw in the chart. Despite Apple’s recent rise in share price, MPEL is still barely the largest holding in my account. Traders seem pretty leery of the recent news about…

Are Large-Cap Stock Bubbles About to Start Bursting?

The history of the stock market is filled with bubbles that inflate and burst. In a free-market economy, this phenomenon is fairly common. Most recently, the U.S. housing bubble of the early 2000’s wreaked havoc on the economy when it started to burst around eight years ago. In hindsight, these bubbles often seem so obvious…

Is Your Regional Bank’s Dividend Safe?

Very few things in the stock market are certain. Share price, earnings, market sentiment, and breaking news stories are all variables that are constantly changing on a day-to-day or month-to-month basis. However, there is one thing that can provide a consistent return: dividends! But before you stuff your portfolio with high-yielding stocks, there are several…

Why You Shouldn’t Trust My Analysis

I put a lot of time and effort into the stock analysis I provide on this site and in my book, so why shouldn’t you trust me? Of course, I believe you should trust me, and I have provided plenty of evidence as to why you should, including this graph, a version of which can be seen…

Practice Makes Perfect

When I started trading the stock market, I started from scratch. I had never even as much as taken a class in finance. Stock trading is a skill, and, as with any other skill, certain people are more naturally talented at trading than others. I think we’d all agree that Lebron James is one of the…

Is It Time to Sell These Insurance Giants at Multi-Year Highs?

The stock market is currently in the middle of one of the most powerful bull markets in its history, and many individual companies have been along for the ride in the past few years. American International Group, (NYSE: AIG), Berkshire Hathaway, Inc (NYSE: BRK-B), and Travelers Companies, Inc. (NYSE: TRV) are all major players in the insurance industry, and their stocks are…

Humility Champion

Anyone that knows me or ever visits this site knows how talented I am at being humble. In fact, I’m so good at being humble that I might even be the humility champion of the world. But since the article I’m working on about some big insurance companies is not going to be finished in…

Is the Stock Market a Zero-Sum Game? Part II

Yesterday I gave some examples of how the stock market is not a zero-sum game. But today I want to talk about one part of the stock market that is essentially a zero-sum game: out-performance. The “price” of the S&P 500 is actually a weighted average of its component stocks based on market capitalization. In this respect, the performance of the overall…