stocks

Acorns App Review | Micro-Investing Made Easy

When investing app Acorns was conceived in 2012, it was lauded as a smart way to invest your spare change. “Anyone can grow wealth,” Acorns asserts on its website. And due to the way the mobile app operates, it really does practice what it preaches. With the Acorns mobile app, anyone can build wealth by […]

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How Risky Mortgages Might Make You Money

The recent trend of mortgage lenders requiring less and less money down might actually be a boon for investors everywhere. In case you haven’t noticed, big lenders like Wells Fargo and Bank of America only require 3% down for a home purchase, and lately the number has dropped to 1% down thanks to other players… Read More »How Risky Mortgages Might Make You Money

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Why I think the Jobs report won’t be helpful for mortgage rates….

Okay, let’s face the fact that the jobs reports and the reports from Ford and General Motors…

2-Minute Money Manager: How Do Student Loans Work?

You practically need a doctorate to understand student loans. Here are the CliffsNotes, including how student loans work and the single best way to repay them.

What is an index fund exactly?

[This is the second installment in a series examining index funds. In Part I, we looked at the managed mutual fund market. In this installment, we will look at how an index is calculated and what an index fund is. In Part III, we’ll consider how to evaluate index funds and where to buy them.]

In the first part of this series, we saw that mutual funds are the dominant investment vehicle for individuals because they reduce risk through diversification on a scale that individuals cannot achieve on their own. And we mentioned that index funds typically have larger returns and lower fees than managed funds but that investors are largely unaware of their existence.

But why do we have index funds, and what are they?

Just a Bit More Selling as Bonds Brace For Tighter Policy

The bond market has specialized in playing defense for most of February as economic data and consistently hawkish Fed  messaging paints a bleak picture.  It’s hard to be too frustrated by the market’s logic.  It’s not as if we’re witnessing some baseless selling spree.  The NFP/CPI combination made a clear case over the past 2 weeks and now this week’s balmy retail sales data is joined by sub-200k Jobless Claims (adds to the Fed’s tight labor market mantra) and a surprisingly high reading in the producer price index.  Once again, a Fed speaker is not far behind the data to reiterate its implications for policy.  This time, it’s Mester putting the notion of a 50bp hike back on the table. Mester doesn’t run the Fed and one Fed speaker saying “50bps” doesn’t mean it’s the consensus.  Markets are trading accordingly–paying some attention to the idea, but not freaking out about it.  This isn’t to say bonds are immune from freaking out for other reasons–just that this alone isn’t worth a massive sell-off.  Fed Funds Futures show the relative impact of the AM data and Mester’s comments. Stocks and bonds are undergoing the quintessential “Fed accommodation trading pattern.”  This is our lackluster term for the sort of mirror image movement seen this morning (it also plays out over longer time horizons).  The pattern is logical if we assume that both stocks and bonds rally when the Fed is seen being friendlier with policy and sell-off when the Fed may be getting less friendly (“selling” means the blue line goes down and the yellow line goes up, to be clear).  Today’s big divergence began precisely at 8:30am ET with the econ data and accelerated at 8:45am with Mester’s comments.

Viral Stock Market Strategies

In light of the COVID bear market, we’re taking this week to look at how various “buy the dip” stock market strategies have performed historically.