Articles

Thousands of investment advisors recommended stop loss orders to their clients. Now it looks like this advice may have been the cause of the May 6, 2010 market plummet.

Everyone is expecting real estate to underperform the stock market for many years going forward.

When the saying first circulated, May was flat. Since 1987, however, May has done phenomenally well, averaging 2.11%.

Your investments should be working for you, appreciating more than inflation to become an engine of growth that pays you money and provides some measure of financial freedom.

In just three short years we’ve added more to the deficit as a percentage of GDP than in the three decades before.

In 1977 economist Milton Friedman wrote an article “The Line We Dare Not Cross: The Fragility of Freedom at ‘60%.'” We are in danger of crossing that line.

David Marotta discusses how to shield your personal assets from the corrosive influence of government policies.

All assets are not equal. Some investments appreciate better on average than others.

Everyone in our risk pool will order filet mignon. First the costs will skyrocket. And then the meat will be rotten.

Sometimes we make the mistake of deliberately budgeting the impossible. If you purposefully set the required spending in one category too high, you won’t be able to trim other categories to bring your overall spending into harmony.

Many budgets are doomed to failure because of the challenge of planning for unplanned spending. Here are some of the items you either did not put in your budget or they shouldn’t be in your spending.

George Marotta is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution pursuing research on international finance.

Get control of the spending that breaks the bank. Certain purchases that are typically both unnecessary and unplanned are budget busters. Avoiding these financial slips requires hedging some of our worst impulses and constraining our desire for instant gratification.

Good things do come from France. Frenchman Antoine Deneriaz captured Olympic gold in the men’s downhill skiing event beating out favorites Austria’s Michael Walchhofer and America’s Bode Miller. His win meant flying madly off jumps and being determined to finish first or break every bone in his body. Your investments shouldn’t be like that.

They say that as long as Americans keep spending, the economy will be strong and unemployment will remain low. “Spend now and pay later” is poor personal policy.