SmartInMoney

 
For investors spooked by financial scams and scandals, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) offer tools to monitor stockbrokers and identify and avoid fraud. They are helpful for investors who are afraid of getting into investing because of recent scandals and the economic meltdown. Continue reading

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Having the right mix of stocks, bonds, cash, and commodities in your portfolio, and being well diversified within each asset class, can have a profound impact of your returns. ETFs can be an easy way to gain this diversification. They can be cheap, flexible, and tax-efficient and may help you gain access to sectors and asset classes that would otherwise be closed off to individual investors. Continue reading

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Historically stocks of small-cap companies had seasonal tendency of outperforming the large-caps around the turn of the year, specifically during January. The existence of this January Effect of stock market return has been widely known. In back testing, researchers have found that it existed in many prior decades.

There are some theories behind this stock market anomaly. Two possible explanation on the January effect are that investors’ activity of buying back into beaten-down small-caps, which were probably sold for tax loss harvesting and window dressing reasons late in the outgoing year. Others speculate that the phenomenon has something to do with less information flow of small cap stock during the year. Continue reading

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From a tax standpoint, dumping losing-money security prior a year end is not a bad idea.  The tax advantages of setting your gains against your losses can be enormous as long as you follow all the rules and implement a few tricks of the trade.
 
Tax-loss harvesting, also commonly known as tax selling, is one of the ways to avoid taxes on some of your portfolio gains. Tax-loss harvesting is the selling of securities, usually at year-end, to realize portfolio losses, which an investor can use to offset capital gains and therefore lower personal tax liability. Continue reading

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After more than two-year financial malaise, signs of recovery finally emerged in 2009 as the economy expanded for the first time in a year in October and stock markets surged above 50% from their the bottom in March. A major challenge to a full recovery is the struggling labor market with a 10.2% unemployment rate.

Housing bubble burst and subprime mortgage disaster in 2006 led to a series of stunning financial closures. They changed the face of Wall Street forever, turned the United States economic to the most serious crisis since the Great Depression, and eventually sent the global financial system into turmoil in the fourth quarter 2008. Continue reading


A kaleidoscope of the critical events in 2008 & 2009:
2009: A Recovery Year of American Economy
2008: A Dark Year of American and World Economy

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The U.S. government-administered insurance fund that protects depositors slipped into the red after fifty banks collapsed during the third quarter. The fund that protects more than $4.5 trillion of U.S. bank deposits fell into the red for the first time since the fallout from the savings-and-loan crisis of the early 1990s as the pace of bank failures accelerated.

The fund had a negative balance of $8.2 billion at the end of September after the fund dropped by $18.6 billion during the third quarter of 2009, federal regulators said Tuesday, Nov. 24. This report confirms what officials of the Federal Insurance Deposit Corporation (F.D.I.C.) said in October that the deposit insurance fund had been depleted. Continue reading

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Market Summary