POST PUBLISHED INDecember, 2009
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  • Seasonality takes the year off

    December 17th, 200908:58 AM ET
    By Joseph Slife
    "What in the world happened to the seasonality of the stock market?" asks Sy Harding of StreetSmartPost.com in the Dec. 14 Barron's (subscription required to access article). Over the years, the market has scored most of its gains between November and April, and most of its losses between May and October. Researchers have thoroughly documented...

  • Work-at-home Scams Update

    December 14th, 200908:53 AM ET
    By Joseph Slife
    Our June cover story, "Making Money From Home," reported on the growing problem of work-at-home scams. A Google search on "work at home" yields about 1.8 million results, some touting intriguing pitch lines such as "Earn $500-$1000 per day" and "Mom Makes $5K/Month at Home." Guess what? Most such ads are simply scams dressed up in work-at-home clo...

  • Bachelor's degree: "necessary, but not sufficient"

    December 11th, 200910:36 AM ET
    By Mark Biller
    Following up on Joseph's October cover article, here's an article from Time magazine asking "Is a College Degree Worth Less?" While covering many of the same bases as Joseph's article, the emphasis here is that because so many people have bachelor's degrees now, they just aren't worth that much to employers. In fact, some employers have come t...

  • It's Difficult to Make Predictions — Especially About the Future

    December 10th, 200911:44 AM ET
    By Joseph Slife
    As we've stressed before, no one knows the future except God. Not even the best and brightest financial "experts" have a good track record for accurate predictions. Writing at SmartMoney.com, Jonathan Hoenig takes note of a few things that the experts got wrong when, at the end of the 1990s, they looked ahead to the next decade: It was just...

  • Thrifty Couples are the Happiest

    December 09th, 200911:27 AM ET
    By Joseph Slife
    New research from the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia shows that "consumer debt...plays a powerful role in eroding the quality of married life." Here are excerpts from the Project's report, "Thrifty Couples Are the Happiest" (PDF), authored by Jeffrey Dew, an assistant professor of Family, Consumer, and Human Development at...

  • Small vs. Large Stocks

    December 08th, 200912:53 PM ET
    By Mark Biller
    We've commented a few times about the rather shocking disparity in gains between the "weakest" and "strongest" stocks since the March lows, but I don't remember seeing it quantified quite as clearly as in this article from Sunday's New York Times: Ford Equity Research, an independent research firm based in San Diego, rates stocks' financial qu...

  • Investors Still Pulling Money Out of Stock Funds

    December 07th, 200901:44 PM ET
    By Mark Biller
    Normally, when the market goes up for a sustained period of time, investors pile into stock investments. Likewise, when the market goes down several months in a row, investors normally pull their money out of stocks. These are not normal times. Having already pulled $12.9 billion out of domestic stock funds between March and October, invest...

  • Tax implications of owning gold

    December 04th, 200910:04 AM ET
    By Mark Biller
    As you might expect, there's very little that's straight-forward about the tax treatment of gold and other precious metals. (For the rest of this post, when I say gold, you can assume the same is true for silver and other precious metals.) First of all, the IRS' perspective regarding owning physical gold, or any type of ETF backed by physical ...

  • Online Savings Tips Round-up

    December 03rd, 200908:09 AM ET
    By Matthew Pryor
    If you're shopping online anyway, you may as well save some money while you're at it. Here's a quick overview of some Internet-based money savers: Bing Cashback: Search for an item, and Bing Shopping will display the different stores' normal price, as well as the "Cashback" price (i.e., store price minus the Bing Cashback amount). You can then...

  • Payback time? NYT looks at the "Debt Bomb"

    December 02nd, 200910:33 AM ET
    By Joseph Slife
    "What a good country or a good squirrel should be doing is stashing away nuts for the winter," bond expert Bill Gross said in last Monday's New York Times. "The United States is not only not saving nuts, it's eating the ones left over from the last winter." Gross, founder of Pimco, the world's largest and most influential bond-investment firm, is ...
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