Hello, my name is Thomas and I would like to thank Chris, Jason, and Frank for the honor of becoming a new contributing writer. I have hosted my own blog at <http://personalfinancefun.wordpress.com/> since February. My frequency of postings had fallen off a little bit as my wife and I prepared to...

Pension plans have long been offered as part of employee benefit packages. Long thought to be an integral part of any retirement plan. But in todays environment, with large corporate bankruptcies and massively underfunded pension programs, do you still rely on your Pension plan? For years...

We're starting a new category on InvestorGeeks called “Entrepreneurship” because we believe that every investor is an entrepreneur at heart. Investing is the process of making money through the active trading and investing in appreciating assets, and this process of building assets is what a...

In his book You Can Be a Stock Market Genius (review at ThinkingAboutMoney.com), Joel Greenblatt discusses the investment opportunities that come from investing in special situations - such as corporate breakups and mergers. Over the next few weeks, Cendant is breaking itself up into four...

There are two types of metals for investment: precious metals as opposed to base metals. Precious metals include gold, silver, platinum, and some other less known materials such as ruthenium, rhodium, palladium, osmium, and iridium. Base and/or industrial metals include copper, nickel, aluminum,...

Today, and the past few days have been hectic for the market. The price of oil keeps rising and I need to sell my gas-guzzling van. So do we panic yet and where is the market going? Over at HipEgg we did a review of the Dow. I don't know if a TA is the right tool for the over all market, I don't...

Certificates of Deposit are not for everyone but if you live long enough you will probably be considering them at some point. If you are going to invest with what banks currently call CDs then you should be smart about it. Using a technique called "laddering" or "stepping" you can improve your...

The market has come a long way since its last major crash -- an event that transferred much wealth from the ignorant to the informed. It almost feels like deja vu when you see VCs lining up again to fund startups, or companies commanding unreasonable stock price multiples based on little more than...

Renault saved Nissan in 1999. The partnership now boasts the highest profit margins in the industry. GM took a $10.6 billion plunge last year. Can the powerhouse French / Japanese duo rescue the US’s largest auto maker? The offer by the French / Japanese group to buy a 20% stake in GM would arm the...

Devaluation of currency is not uncommon in other countries, but so far has been moderate in the U.S (in part because the dollar is the world’s currency). I recently discussed this in an article titled Speculating on the Future of the Dollar. But given our massive debt, budget deficit and trade...