FINTAG COMMENT Transparency is not the answer. Investors are really confused. I had an unpleasant meeting yesterday with a long term investor. Like many others they had been quite happy with a chirpy newsletter every quarter with some purple and blue defaulted excel pie charts and pseudo poetic ... Read more

Why this trade after the sell off?  I don’t just take any ole stock that has a sell off.  I am looking for a point in which the stock becomes exhausted in the price moment. CFL had seven 5 minute bars red that sold off.  Now these bars are key because they are not overlapping.  ... Read more

Just before Christmas of 2008, the president signed the Worker, Retiree, and Employer Recovery Act of 2008. The bill suspended 2009 Required Minimum Distributions (RMDs) for IRAs, 401(k)s and 403(b)s. The intent of this change was primarily to give a break to retirees whose account balanc ... Read more

Today the House Financial Services Committee will hear testimony from the SEC inspector general on the Madoff scandal . It promises to be the beginning of what Rep. Paul Kanjorski (chairman of the House Subcommittee on Capital Markets, Insurance and Government-Sponsored Enterprises) is calling & ... Read more

When it rains it pours! As if investors didn't have enough to worry about, you can now add whether their fiduciaries are not only investing poorly, but whether they are ripping them off completely! Madoff arrested, charged; may be facing $50 billion in losses: FBI - MarketWatch : "Bernard Mad ... Read more

Remember about a week ago when I promised you Don't Mess With Taxes' second annual Year-end Money Moves series and kicked it off with tax moves to make by Dec. 31? I haven't forgotten! It's just that some other interesting timely blog items popped up. Then, just as I planned t ... Read the full ... Read more

Contango and Backwardation are two terms that confuse many students. But with today's oil markets giving us an historic (and memorable!) example of contango, I trust many more will remember it going forward. First the fast definitions: (want a better definition? see Investorwords.com ) Contango ... Read more

When I first got into the business of writing about the financial markets, it was the summer of 2000.   Seven years later, in the fall of 2007, I was offered and accepted a position as senior editor of TradingMarkets. Given how the markets behaved shortly after those two career moves, it mi ... Read more

There is nothing so nice as to start my morning rounds of financial work, reading and account reviews and upon logging into my BullionVault account, finding that people have ordered in the last 24 hours and commission is sitting there waiting to be turned into gold bullion. One mouse click and ... Read more