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…

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…

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…

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…

World Wrestling Entertainment (NYSE: WWE) shareholders have spent most of the past few weeks in shock after witnessing the stock take a swan dive from all-time highs of about $32 in March to below $11. On the surface, the company appears as successful as ever, so how could this disaster possibly have happened? It turns out that,…

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…

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…

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…

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…

A zero-sum game is a game in which the magnitude of one player’s success will be equal to the magnitude of another player or players’ failures. For example, when you play Texas Hold ‘Em with your four buddies, every dollar that goes into every pot came from somebody’s wallet. At the end of the night,…