Posts under ‘Investing’

In the time of blogs, online media, aggregation services, message boards and 24 hour a day business television, it is easy to cast printed business magazines to the side as a valuable tool for getting investment news. I disagree and think there is a strong case for maintaining a few magazine subscriptions to publications such [...]

At $21.80 per share, RadioShack stock (symbol: RSH) is resting close to its 52 week high today.  Goldman Sachs upgraded it on the fact that the “powerful” turnaround effort is going well.  While my belief back in December was that the stock would decline on heavy competition from its competitiors, I’m starting to believe that the stock is [...]

This week’s Business Week has an interesting article about the Ethanol-based fuel boom and how it is affecting the world economy. I had heard through other sources about the limitations and drawbacks of shifting to a more ethanol based fuel supply, but hadn’t thought of all the ramifications.
According to the Business Week article, the ethanol [...]

I starting thinking about Google’s sources of revenue tonight, specifically their AdSense program, and decided to do a little research. What got me interested was understanding how their AdSense program, which pays content providers when a user clicks on a Google-provided text ad on their site, relates to their bottom line.
Logically, the Google’s [...]

I’ve been investing in the stock market for many years but, for a variety of reasons, I never traded any stock options. I had always had a high level of interest in options as they have limited risk with an extremely high amount of leverage, but I hadn’t gotten around to actually pulling the [...]

If you haven’t heard of Prosper.com yet, you may hear about it very soon. The company was started by E-Loan cofounder Chris Larsen and, according to their website, they have 140,000 members and have funded $27,000,000 in loans in the past year. Their platform allows individual borrowers and lenders to come together to [...]

Calculating compound interest without a calculator can be difficult. Thinking back to my business school days, I remember the formula is something like:
present_value * (1 + interest_per_period) ^ number_of_periods] = future_value
Even if you can remember the formula, calculating 1.08 to the power of 9 is not an easy task to do in your head.
If you [...]

Its often difficult for people to track their economic progress. There is, generally a lot going on in one’s economic life. People have auto loans, credit card debt, student loans, home mortgage debt, stock accounts, retirement accounts, cash in savings and often other types of investments that may be a bit less mainstream. [...]

For the last year or so, I’ve been thinking about what investment opportunities are available out there if you have cash available. I don’t have the cash, but interest rates are still low, making the cost of borrowing cheap. Credit cards are easy to come by, home equity loans allow people to borrow against [...]