The second quarter earnings season started just like the Fourth of July - with a bang!
The hard-hit financial sector delivered some good news last week as companies such as Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase announced earnings that pleased the market. In the tech sector, Intel and IBM provided support, too. On the other hand, [...]

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Warren Buffett has said his favorite holding period is forever. Does he follow his own advice?
Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway recently posted its worst quarterly loss in more than 20 years and a big chunk of that was due to what Buffett called a “major mistake.” Less than a year ago, with oil prices nearing their all-time [...]

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Despite another harrowing decline in the banking sector last week, the overall stock market has been holding up rather well, considering the circumstances.
Many analysts thought the worst of the banking crisis was behind us, but Citigroup and Bank of America reminded us last week that all is not well in the land of lending. [...]

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While stock markets are down, there may be one market where you can actually make some money.
Collapsing real estate prices helped lead us into the current recession and the government realizes that stabilizing real estate prices may be one key to pulling us out of the recession. Accordingly, the government is doing what it [...]

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With 2008 in the history books, we’ll use this week’s commentary to review some of the key stories over the past year. As you well know, it was not one of the market’s finest performances.
STOCKS SUFFERED MIGHTILY
Global stock markets shed about $30 trillion dollars in market value over the past 12 months. Of that, about [...]

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We typically think of stock market volatility as a “bad” thing, but last week, we saw the “upside” of volatility.
As the chart indicates below, the broad-based S&P 500 index rose a stunning 12% for the week. Barron’s said it was the largest one-week gain in that index since 1974. In the holiday-shortened week, the S&P [...]

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“Hope springs eternal,” wrote Alexander Pope back in the 1700s and, after a rocky start, we ended last week on a hopeful note.
If you look at the numbers in the chart below, it was another disappointing week in the stock market. Last Wednesday and Thursday didn’t help matters as the Dow Jones Industrial Average posted [...]

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On second thought, maybe that wasn’t such a good idea.
Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson did an about face last week as he told Congress that the administration was backing away from the original plan of using the $700 billion bailout fund to purchase toxic mortgages. Instead, he said they would like to “consider using (the) remaining [...]

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Last week’s business news underscored the severity of the current economic slowdown.
We all know October was a bad month in the financial markets. What we didn’t know until last week was how bad the economy was faring during the market meltdown. Well, on Friday, the Labor Department delivered the dreaded news that our economy shed [...]

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Thank goodness, October is over.
Market historians were busy last month rewriting the record books on what seemed like a daily basis. Unfortunately, many of the new records were the type that we’d prefer to have remained unbroken. Here are a few of the new entries:
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