Investing
Reuters has an article today noting that the S&P500 index is in negative territory for the 2011 year. That’s bad news for the huge number of investors invested in index funds. The benchmark for many mutual funds and other investment’s performance is down approximately 3 percent year to date. To get make the market index [...]
Bloomberg has an interesting snippet about that so-called “lost decade” everyone keeps talking about. It turns out if you had invested in the stocks of the S&P 500 equally (equal weight) back at the market peak of March 24, 2000, you would have had a 66 percent gain through December 2, 2011, not a zero [...]
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IBM must really hate the idea of paying a big dividend. Every year, it seems, IBM authorizes billions of more dollars for share buybacks while increasing its dividend by the smallest amount possible. Then, the company goes on to crow about how it has returned "… over $109 billion since 2008 to our shareholders through [...]
Sometimes it seems like the stock market is just messing with people. After seemingly running off of a cliff to end the third quarter of 2011, the market has recently staged a rally. Take a look at a chart for the Dow Jones Industrial Average and you’ll see a low point on October 3, 2011. [...]
The third quarter just closed on September 30th and it was not a pretty sight for short-term investors. The S&P 500 closed at 1,131.42 which is down 14 percent for the third-quarter. It started the year by opening on January 3rd (the 1st and 2nd were Saturday and Sunday, respectively) at 1,257.62. That is a [...]
Has Google Already Beating Groupon? Not long ago, Google offered to buy Groupon for $6 billion. Soon thereafter, Groupon did another round of private equity financing that essentially paid off company founders and early investors such that they have already locked in sizable gains. That might be a very good thing since Groupon seems to [...]
Reporting most investment income is pretty straightforward. Calculate the gain or loss and enter it on Schedule D. The only trick is whether to report as a long-term or short-term capital gains or capital losses. With short sales, however, there are a couple of tax tricks to know about how they get reported. Long-Term or [...]
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Several major banks, including most of those deemed “too big to fail,” are set to raise their dividends and announce large stock repurchases after passing the latest Federal Reserve “stress test.” Banks and financial institutions that have repaid their government bailout TARP funds and passed the stress test have been given the go-ahead by the [...]
Continue reading about Banks to Buy Back Shares, Raise Dividends After Passing Fed’s "Stress Test"
Pimco Total Return is the biggest bond mutual fund in the world. It has a long-term track record that any bond fund would be jealous of. As a result, its fund manager, Bill Gross, has become something of an oracle of investing in bonds. Recently, the mutual fund reported its holdings. Like all mutual fund [...]
Continue reading about PIMCO Total Return Bond Fund Cuts U.S. Government Holdings
