Most people invest in bonds because they want to have stable fixed income. Because the performance of bonds are very stable, they also serve to reduce the volatility of the overall portfolio. Depending on the weighting from 0% to 100%, you can reduce your stock volatility correspondingly. With...

One of the reasons I really get into stock investing is that I like to live vicariously through my investments. Say what? Yes, I live vicariously through my stock holdings because I imagine that I'm the owner of the company -- hard at work building it. I become an intimate stakeholder of the...

I recently have been looking at the Bid-Ask Spread (sometimes called the Bid-Offer Spread) to help me determine the right time to add to my positions. Here are some tips I’ve picked up that you might find useful when looking at your stock’s spread. 1. Understand the Numbers There are four pieces...

Mr. Market is an Idiot. On June 21st, I posted an article "Thinking About Garmin" in which I proposed that Garmin is uniquely positioned as the leader in a technology that is "crossing the chasm" from early adopter to mainstream. I was expecting a stellar earning report this week, which is exactly...

Digg, the extremely popular article voting site, is now part of InvestorGeeks! We've recently installed a new feature that will allow you to digg your favorite IG articles right from our site. New articles that we feel are digg-worthy will have the familiar digg box in the upper left corner. If...

Gold & silver, or precious metals (PM) as they are referred to in the investing community, are a kind of commodity. Physical commodity investing is not usually done as a long term investment. This is because a commodity has no value besides its intrinsic value. It will never increase in quantity...

The rapidly rising U.S. trade deficit with China has caused some US entrepreneurial homebuilders to “think outside the box”. Or rather – think “using the box”. The Facts China exported $243 billion worth of goods to the US last year (2005). The US exported only $41.5 billion worth of goods...

There are about as many variations on the moving average as there are investors using them. While it's generally understood that no one configuration is going to be the holy grail of predicting stock prices, each investor has their own baselines or favorites that they come back to. Below, I'll talk...

Sherman, set the wayback machine to the winter of 1999! This was a time when everyone thought they were a financial genius. You couldn't loose, or so we thought. I was a conservative investor even in those days but a co-worker was talking about a great investment tip he heard from a friend who had...

If you're anything like me then you think that once you click on the appropriate button, or get off the phone with your stock broker, your order speeds off to be filled at whatever price the stock is currently trading at. How wrong I was. After placing an order to buy a stock recently, I was...