How long wo you think the current financial crisis will last?
Yes, we at doitinvest.com are kindly asking for your opinion on this “thorny issue”. Please feel free to comment to this blogpost at the will of you heart. Thank you,
The Doitinvest team
US homeowners consider their houses lost value
In a recent survey by Zillow, the vast majority of the homeowners surveyed think their houses lost value over the past year. This is hardly new in itself, as doitinvest.com has warned about it a few times. however, the 51% who sustain this statement is really worrying.
How to analyze currency movements w/o paying money for it
Did you ever feel the urge to look at a currency chart plotting in relationship to another currency? Well, we at doitinvest.com felt it. Yesterday. And we tried to find a quick and easy solution to analyze it.
And we found a solution, of course, otherwise we would not be writing this investment blog.
So, suppose you want to plot the USD against the Eurofor the last month on a quick-glance graph…and eventually apply lots of extrapolation analysis to it. This seemed a simple idea at the beginning, which doitinvest tried to apply by searching the web for the forex sites.
Structured Settlement Payments - trading risk for certainty
In the recent volatile markets investors remained with huge amounts of cash withdrawn from the volatile stock exchanges around the world or from selling (hopefully high) their mortgages or real estate properties. Of course, as any normal US investor, this huge amount of cash raises some serious issues: first of all a bank deposit cannot guarantee any longer a good return over the long term, secondly a bank deposit can be neither safe, as the recent news continue to prove (yesterday for example the Dutch government has injected $13,5 billion in the famoun European ING bank in a desperate attempt to keep it floating).
What to do then? Well, structured settlement payments can be one solution. This financial instrument consists in the client selling its settlement (potential or actual) to a specialised company and receiving back a lump sum of money - or an anuity, based on a negoatiated contract. Structured settlement payments look a lot like factoring, whereby you sell some uncertain future revenue for a certain present stream of revenues. It is like trading risk for return instantly.
Why does the oil price continue to go down?
Well, that is an interesting question I think – and it shares some of the reasons why the Detroit auto makers are now desperately looking for a bailout from the US government similar to the banking ones.
For a long time, OPEC countries though to be the masters of the moving universe. These highly power-concentrated countries have names which resound like a big mantra for some and a big curse for the others – Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, Iran etc. They base all of their fortunes on oil supply and the founding of OPEC was done to control the oil supply and to make them richer.
Detroit car makers heading for big cash troubles
I was recently wondering why the Detroit car makers are so desperate to merge (see the recent talks between GM and Cerberus Capital Management, the saviour who 17 months ago bought Chrysler from Daimler Benz). Of course, their car sales are plummeting, especially the trucks and the leasing sales, who were the profit drivers of these companies. But this is not the first recession they went through, so why are they so desperate right now?
Again, recession and lower sales is not a new thing for the Detroit big three. It started more than 10 years ago when Toyota and Honda moved aggressively on the US market and culminated with the Asian producers holding a bigger market share than the US domestic car makers since 2006 (oh, what a historical day!).
MBA grads to be blamed on the current crisis?
It might seem so. In a recent spur of public statements, Andrew Lahde, a former hedge fund manager who won 870% on his blogs last year, thanked the “stoopid traders” who made him a very rich man with their stocks trading techniques. And this in a farewell letter to his customers!
Stock trading in the global circus
As mentioned before on doitinvest, DJIA looks like a yo-yo. The same for the oil price and for the profits of the companies today…
DJIA plunged again on a panic access to 8,600 points, after a big gain which was driving it just a few days ago up to 9,500. Looking at this yo-yo of trading a wild idea came to me - what if the news sources do not really get it and the causes of this stocks variations are not a result of the panic?
Stocks technical analysis on shares - pro’s and con’s
Technical analysis is a wide domain and many potential investors use if for trying to predict future “abnormalities” on the market returns of the target companies’ stocks. Of course, this activity resembles a lot to gold mining - you have to dig a lot (or do lots of analysis) to get to the shining ore of a potential stock increase.
Historical average values for the Dow Jones index (DJIA)
The historical values of the Dow Jones Industrial Average Index are obviously of interest for both the economy historians and the world wide investors. Above all of this, the history of the DJIA is the history of almost a century of American economical growth.
Many companies have disappeared since the founding of Dow Jones. Many others have been started, so that today DJIA has less than 10% of its componence shared with its beginnings. One thing has remained the same though - it contains companies which are widely traded and which are a symbol for the power of the American economy. Above all, the component companies represent the support of an efficient market hypotesis which has made so far the US economy the most powerful on Earth.