Richardcyoung.com

Investing

Lawyers 1, Savers 0

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President Obama’s latest financial regulation on retirement accounts will not help savers. But it will help the lawyers. What the White House is trying to do is force savers to work with investment advisors, not brokers, when rolling over their 401(k). I’ve long been a proponent of investments advisors for my own obvious reasons—I am […]

My #1 Career Tip

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I come from a long history of salesmen in my family. My grandfather owned a successful retail clothing business in New Bedford, MA managing upwards of 50 salesmen at a time. My father was in sales beginning in his teens knocking on doors for Fuller Brush, then Electrolux and later owned a real estate brokerage. […]

Peak Oil: Who Knows When?

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Over 50 years ago M. King Hubbert published his theory which has become known as the Hubbert Curve. Simply put, when you reach peak production of a finite resource, then half of the original reserves have been produced and the remaining half will be produced in a decline pattern that is a mirror image of […]

Peak Oil in America? 

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Yes! During my 14-year run in the institutional research and trading business in Boston, the finest analyst with whom I worked was oil analyst Dave Hammer. Since 1990 Dave has been the managing partner of Hammer Asset Management. We stay in touch to this day. Yesterday I asked Dave about my concern that shale production […]

Market Collapse: Last Mango in Paris

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“If the phone doesn’t ring it’s me” — Jimmy Buffett Are we having fun yet? Since peaking at 17,279.74 on September 19, the Dow Jones Industrial Average Index has lost 6.6% of its value. If you haven’t been investing very long, this is what it’s supposed to feel like. During bull markets it’s easy to […]

Thoughts on the Markets

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Volatility has picked up in financial markets in recent weeks. It is still mostly noise at this point, but the sell-off has done damage to the technical picture of the market. The NYSE Advance/Decline line for stocks is in the tank, key moving average levels, support levels, and trend channels have been breached by various […]

Dow Down 300

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The Dow hit some new highs last month, but it also was down more than 300 points on the last day of July. Recent polls suggest that economic pessimism remains relatively widespread. And why should it not be? Our national debt is $17.6 trillion and growing. Furthermore, as Jim Geraghty writes in NRO, since 2007 […]

Your Success is a Choice

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Over the weekend I read an article on the top 50 annuities. It was the weekly feature in a major financial publication. I can only conclude that someone has to pay to keep the lights on at the publication. Most investors have a number of investing options they should do first, like max out their […]

Win By Not Losing

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If you have a dollar and lose $0.25 you’re left with $0.75. You’ve lost 25% of what you had, but to get back to $1.00, you’ll have to generate 33% of what you have now. To get it back you could go to work or you could hope the market helps you out. In real […]

Once in a Lifetime Stress?

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You need to check out this stress index. The Kansas City Financial Stress Index is a monthly measure of stress in the U.S. financial system based on 11 financial market variables—including the high-yield bond/Baa spread, volatility (VIX), and the correlation between returns on stocks and Treasury bonds. As you can see in the chart below […]