What are hedge funds, and why are they so revered by some and hated by others? Hedge funds are simply pools of money from specific investors designed to outperform the market through alternative investment strategies.
Hedge funds involve higher risk, and thus participation is limited to accredited investors who have a net worth of over
Stocks
The plunging price of oil has been one of the biggest economic stories of the past eight months or so. Falling oil prices impact many sectors of the economy, but oil production (not surprisingly) is the sector that is most directly affected.
Investors who own shares of major oil production companies like Exxon-Mobil, British Petroleum
Tax-loss harvesting is a strategy of strategically selling certain assets at a loss to neutralize capital gains and limit your tax liability. Investors often evaluate their portfolios toward the end of the year to look for opportunities to apply this strategy.
How it Works If you have more in losses than you do in capital
What do Silicon Valley and agriculture have in common? Not much, you may think… but agriculture and technology are becoming increasingly intertwined. Tech companies see financial opportunities in agricultural pursuits, farmers see potential cost savings and higher yields through technological improvements, and perhaps world hunger may be reduced as a result.
The tech industry is
Investing in the stock market is an inherently risky endeavor. Throughout history, the major stock indices have risen and fallen sharply over both short and long periods of time, leading some investors to avoid stocks due to their volatility.
However, what if you could buy “stock insurance” that would effectively limit your portfolio losses should
The term “market correction” is unsettling to most investors, but it really should not be. If you take the longer view of investing and resist overreacting, you may be able to capitalize on the correction and make long-term lemonade out of short-term lemons.
A correction is generally defined as a relatively short-term loss of 10%
Exchange-Traded Funds (ETFs) can be tricky to value, because they have the pricing characteristics of both mutual funds and stocks.
ETF’s, like mutual funds, contain a market basket of shares of different companies, and so their valuation is calculated as a Net Asset Value (NAV) which gives you the collective valuation of the underlying holdings
Pairs trading, developed by analysts at Morgan Stanley in the 1980s, uses correlation between two similar investment vehicles to create a market-neutral trading strategy – where profits are not related to whether the overall market goes up or down.
Correlation of two investment vehicles refers to how their prices change relative to each other. If
“The Witching Hour” sounds like a bad public access television show, but it really refers to a particular time of day where odd and unexplainable things happen. When referring to stocks, it means pretty much the same thing, except that the reasons behind the activities are somewhat explainable.
Triple-witching days occur four times a year
Tax-loss selling is a means of lowering your tax burden by selling off underperforming stocks or securities at a loss. The resulting loss may be used to offset capital gains (if you’ve held the stock for more than a year) or ordinary income (if you’ve held it for less than a year). In either case,
Stock options were formerly considered best left to stock trading professionals. But these days, trading stock options is almost as easy as buying and selling shares of stocks or mutual funds. Stock options are even allowed in self-directed Individual Retirement Accounts (IRA’s). Even as options have become easier to access and trade, they may still