About three months ago, I wrote a post about why it’s dangerous to listen to self-proclaimed stock “experts” instead of doing your own research. In that post, I included the same graph of my portfolio compared to the S&P 500 that can be found on the cover (and throughout the inside) of my book. 

The big news when it came to Amazon this morning was that the company bought Twitch for $1 billion. After reading countless analysts’ opinions of the purchase on CNN Money and Yahoo Finance and then turning on CNBC and getting several more earfuls, I felt I had a pretty clear picture of the analysts’s opposing…

Hewlett-Packard released their quarterly earnings last week, and the market’s reaction to the news has been awesome so far for shareholders like me. The company produced earnings that were in line with expectations and issued forward guidance that was at the high end of the expected range. There are plenty of summaries of the numbers online,…

On Wednesday, I wrote about the Maximum Pain Theory  and the role it plays in share price movement.  The main idea is that the actions of option writers drive share prices toward nice, round numbers, or the “max pain” strike price. The example I looked at was Apple, which, after breaking above $100 for the…

I mentioned Tuesday in my post about Apple breaking the $100 mark that the rest of the week would be critical for Apple shareholders. Today I’d like to talk about one reason why the rest of the week might end up being pretty boring for Apple shareholders. This reason is also yet another reason round numbers…

Apple closed the day above $100 per share for the first time since its stock split earlier this year. I made mention of this “round number roadblock” for Apple back on August 1. While Apple’s first close in the triple digits is certainly a good thing for shareholders, today’s trading doesn’t necessarily mean we are…

To conclude my three part series on volatility (part 1 and part 2 here), I wanted to take a look at exactly how “safe” low-beta stocks are when it comes to market downturns. After all, isn’t the whole point of owning low-beta stocks to reduce risk? So we’re going to hop in the time machine…

Yesterday I wrote about beta and discussed how it is calculated and what it means. But unless you know how to use beta to your advantage, it’s no more than a fun fact. Risk management  is one of the major themes of my book. I specifically address age as one important factor in determining the appropriate risk…

Last week, I read an article on CNN by Paul La Monica entitled “How to Stay Safe in a Scary Market.” In the article, La Monica says So now’s the time… to be looking at blue chip, dividend-paying companies that can hold up well during rocky periods for the broader market. The idea is that,…

The other day I got to thinking about the Efficient-Market Hypothesis (EMH). EMH is the idea that the stock market is “informationally efficient,” meaning that a stock is always accurately valued at any given time based on the information that is publicly available about the stock at that time. In other words, day-to-day changes in…